How To Tell If Your Wine Is Corked: It's Not Always A Smell

(Forbes) - Cork taint is likely the single most preventable wine quality issue in the industry. Mother Nature might assault vineyards with rain, frost and heat but a good winemaker works around climactic whims. All year vines are managed; during harvest equipment is scrupulously cleaned and fermentation assiduously controlled. Indeed, winemakers hyperventilate over every detail: taste, blend, taste, blend, age in thousand-dollar French oak barrels, taste some more, then bottle. Winemaking demands a year or more of labor, painstaking cleanliness and, of course, expense. It seems absurdly unfair that this genuine labor of love can be felled by a meager, seemingly innocent little ‘ol cork. It’s a bitter truth. One small cork polluted with the sinister TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) molecule (yes, molecule!) means the end of a wine’s appeal, like topping off your soufflé with a moldy sock. And, there’s this new interesting tidbit of news from our scientific community: TCA, or cork taint is actually not a specific smell, but rather TCA is fiendishly clever at masking a wine’s aroma, muting our sniffer and distorting our perceptions of aroma. Not only can TCA infect wine with a wet basement smell, now we discover that it’s actually manipulating everything in the glass. Great.

In most cases, cork taint is quite detectable—jumping out of the glass like a smelly old codger in a wet wool coat. But, the Cliff Notes version of this new development is that you can open a bottle of wine and not initially detect any cork taint (even though it’s lurking in there) but the wine’s aromas and taste will be off, weird and strange.