Off My Cork Taint Game

I have to admit, I might be a little off my cork taint game.

Yesterday I went into the winery to grab a bottle of Grenache Rosé. We’re pairing it with a salad for our Sip into Spring event in a couple of weeks, and I had homework to do. Weeks before we host these events, we obsess over details. How much citrus. Which herbs. Will this cheese flatten the wine. Will that nut make it sing.

It’s hard work. Really.

But instead of grabbing one bottle, I grabbed two. Why? I don’t know. Sixth sense?

Later that evening I opened the first bottle and was surprised. I hadn’t tasted this new wine in a bit and wasn’t expecting the slightly caramelly quality coming out of my glass. It felt tired. Muted. Not right. Uh oh.

Carrie was still at the tasting room doing the real work while I was playing, so I started working through pairings solo. Cara Cara oranges. Cotija. Pistachios. A touch of lemon zest. Yes. The lemon zest made the whole thing snap into place.

And then it hit me.

“This wine is corked.”

Corked doesn’t mean there are little pieces of cork floating in your glass. It means the wine has been tainted by a compound called trichloroanisole. It’s as hard to spell as it is to say. Everyone just calls it TCA. It won’t hurt you, but it can strip a wine of its fruit and leave behind aromas that smell like a damp basement or wet cardboard.

Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s subtle. A wine can just seem dull or prematurely aged without screaming mold. Everyone has a different sensitivity level, but humans are surprisingly good at detecting it. We can pick up TCA in parts per trillion. Bloodhound territory.

When we first started making wine, cork taint was a real problem. Our first bottling of Patriarche, the 2002 vintage, was brutal. We averaged three to four bad bottles per case. Even back then, that was bad. We clearly got a flawed batch.

Cork is harvested and laid out to dry and that’s where things can go sideways. Today, cork producers use improved washing techniques and rigorous sensory screening. Our cork supplier, Scott Laboratories, even guarantees their closures. If we find a corked bottle, they reimburse us for the full retail value of the wine! That would have been unthinkable twenty-five years ago, when the industry was scrambling toward plastic corks, sugar cane closures and screw caps trying to solve the problem.

So I opened the second bottle.

Oh wow. There it was. The wine I remembered bottling. Fresh. Bright. Alive.

Usually I can smell the taint on the cork the second I pull it. Was my nose getting lazy now that cork taint is almost nonexistent? Or was this bottle right at that threshold where it dulls the wine without shouting its presence?

Either way, I raise a glass to taint-free bottles and modern cork warranties.

And for the record, we have always replaced wines, at our cost, for any customer who finds a bad bottle.

Homework completed.

Josh Bendick
Co-winemaker