It’s a not altogether unlikely scenario:

“Sir, madam, your wine.  Who would like to taste it?” 

“Oh… erm… well I’m sure it’s fine, but go on then…” 

Glug, glug, glug. 

A sniff, a sip…  Hang on – that doesn’t smell quite right.  There’s a sort of dullness.  Almost something musty.  But what on earth to do next?  The sommelier hovers expectantly.  What the hell do you say?  Is there something wrong with the wine?  Or does the fault lie somewhere along your nasal passages?  Maybe it’s just that you’ve chosen poorly off the list (again) and it’s simply an example of unimpressive plonk.  There’s lots of it about, after all. Or is there more to it than that?  Could the wine be faulty?  Could it even be “corked”?  Oh Christ alive this is getting awkward...

Now, let’s get one thing straight.  A ‘corked’ bottle is not one with bits of cork floating in it, nor a bottle that was a fighter to open, damaging the closure in the ensuing battle with the corkscrew.  A corked or tainted bottle may not even have been the fault of the cork, although statistically, the cork may be in trouble.

No, corked wine (or bottle taint, as we call it in the trade) comes down to science, and a nasty little fungal blighter called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (or TCA, which I find slips off the tongue much more easily).  This can work its way in to the wine after being present in the natural cork (more likely) or affecting the innards of the winery (less likely, given the common use of sulphur in the vinification process…  Sulphur, incidentally, is great at killing bugs, but is one of the reasons why you sometimes end up with the blinder behind the eyes after a night on the plonk).

And the result?  Well it varies from bottle to bottle.  There are in fact degrees of cork taint.  Sometimes barely noticeable, on other occasions absolutely ruinous, cork taint usually imparts the same sort of aroma in a wine - something you notice on your first sniff.  A whiff of damp cardboard is perhaps the best way to describe it.  A mustiness.  Think wet horse (not too many of those in the restaurant, presumably?) and you’re about there.  Maybe you’re particularly unlucky, and the waft is of a rotting compost heap.  In any case, it’s pretty unmistakable and, once identified, rarely forgotten.  Certainly, it warrants a fresh bottle, so back it goes, and fingers crossed the next one’s alright.

So how common is the problem?  AB recounts: "In one particular tasting may years ago, I remember 3 out of 12 wines being corked.  Unlucky?  They went back to the merchant, who said that of his hundreds of bottles sold each week, barely a single one came back."  Back in those days, prior to various technological innovations, estimates suggested 10% of wine was corked.  Just imagine all those people thinking, ‘What a rubbish wine; tasted odd, I’ll never buy that again’.

These days, the number is much lower.  In fact the industry reckons about 5% of wine is affected to a greater or lesser degree.  This is partly due to better treatment of the cork itself - the use of chlorine, for example, has been associated with the development of cork taint - and means, happily, that there’s still hope for the cork industry (a vital employer in Portugal) and the thousands of acres of ancient cork oak forests that decorate the Iberian countryside.  It is also, partly, because of the move to Stelvin closures – that’s screw caps to you and me – as well as synthetic ‘cork’ closures.  So the chances of getting a bad ‘un are considerably lower these days.  But at least you now know what to look for.

So, there we are.  A bluffers guide to cork taint in wine.  And in the unlikely (but not altogether avoidable) event that you find there’s a wet horse in one of our bottles, stick the cork back in and bring the whole lot back – we will happily replace it.  Unless of course you bought it elsewhere, in which case we’ll sell you something far superior instead!

The Vinotopia Team

Website: http://www.vinotopiawine.co.uk

Tel: 01666 502262

Email: info@vinotopiawine.co.uk