A Tainted Cork Could be the Problem

A Tainted Cork Could Be the Problem

Robert Whitley
The Record, Bergen County, NJ - January 16, 2002

There is a black lining to the silver cloud that looms over the worldwide wine industry. At the risk of sounding like a cork- sniffing wine snob, potential problems lurk at each and every twist of the corkscrew.

Odds are extremely high that if you've pulled more than the token cork or two from a bottle of wine over the past year, you've opened an unacceptable number of spoiled wines. Yes, spoiled wines.

I know this firsthand.

The spoilage is cork taint. A wine with cork taint is said to be "corked" and it smells and tastes foul, unless you happen to be the rare oenophile who prizes the pungent aroma of wet cardboard.

Cork taint is widespread throughout the wine industry and is found in wines from virtually every corner of the globe. Cork taint does not play favorites. I've opened very expensive corked wines from several of the finest producers in France, Italy, Spain, and the United States over the past several years.

The culprit is a fungus called tricloroanisole. TCA is a chemical that invades the bark of the cork oak tree during the aging and drying stage of cork production. It produces a moldy, dank, wet cardboard aroma that an infected cork transfers to the wine. Industry estimates of cork spoilage range from 2 percent to 10 percent, a staggering figure when you consider a 1-million-case-a-year winery could be selling as much as 100,000 cases of spoiled wine every year.

During the 2001 Monterey Wine Competition, for example, one Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon entry was awarded a double-gold medal and nominated for best-of-show red wine, only to be denied that opportunity because two of the four bottles that comprise an entry were corked.

By the time the entry had worked its way through the elimination rounds, not even one bottle remained for judges to evaluate during the best-of-show tasting.

Cork taint has always had a presence in the wine industry, but the problem has grown and persisted over the past decade despite ongoing efforts to pressure cork producers to be more vigilant. Huge worldwide demand for corks and the absence of strict controls in the major cork-producing countries Portugal, Italy, and Spain exacerbate the issue.

The solution would seem to be synthetic corks, but there is resistance within the wine industry to abandon the 300-year-old tradition of the cork closure. Several prominent wineries in this country, including the likes of Bonny Doon, St. Francis, and Murphy- Goode, have had success with the synthetic cork. But the majority of wineries prefer to do it the old-fashioned way. So what is the ultimate end-user you, the consumer to do? Fight back. Fight back by taking the wine back (if purchased from a wine merchant) or sending it back (in a restaurant). And don't take "no" for an answer. Spoiled wine should be replaced or your money refunded, period.

Do it enough, and eventually the merchant or restaurateur will complain to his distributor. The distributor will complain to the winery. When a winery begins to see a substantial part of its inventory and its profits returned for a refund, then maybe, just maybe, the problem of spoiled wine will be addressed seriously.

(C) 2002 The Record, Bergen County, NJ. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved

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