When Corks Attack
They do it with TCA

February 8th, 2004
It was hardly an international incident, but embarrassing all the same. The highly touted Zinfandel I ordered to impress visiting winemaker Xavier Berger-Devieux, proprietor of Burgundy's Manoir de Mercey, wasn't really terrible, just... I meant to show that America had the chops, vinously speaking, to give France a run for her Euros. But I blew it.

Or did I? Perhaps the wine was corked, or tainted by 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole (TCA), a chemical compound you can detect in concentrations akin to one sugar cube dissolved in a hundred Olympic swimming pools.

Corked wines smell musty, grassy, reminiscent of wet cardboard. So if my Zinfandel was corked, wouldn't I know it? Not necessarily. TCA can also steal in, make off with all the fruit, aromas, and other goodies, and scamper out without leaving a trace. Monsieur Berger-Devieux was as flummoxed as I was. Check it out: two wine professionals, reduced to "Um, it shouldn't taste like this...should it?"

Kumeu River Winery in New Zealand rejected forty-two out of sixty-two batches of cork in 1998, but got contamination anyway. "Many customers did not identify cork taint, but just thought that the wine was perhaps not very good. We have no way of knowing how many customers were lost," they said.
Be honest: have you ever choked down weird wine in silence, thinking, perhaps, it was an acquired taste? I did, until I twigged to TCA. Now I can't avoid it. Corked bottles are running one for six in my tasting lab. When it happens-- wham!--there goes the wine's chance for a recommendation. Too bad for them. As for me, at least I didn't pay for the bottle. But how about when you do? "A $15 Pinot Blanc turns up corked, that's sad, but a $300 Romanée-Conti you've stored for ten years-- that's tragedy," says Hubert Trimbach of Alsace. Even his ultra-reliable, eponymous winery has had cork issues.

The race is on to clean up corks. TCA gets an early start, in the forests. A close cousin, Tribromoanisol (TBA), lurks in flame-retardant chemicals and fungicides. Both settle into the wood and air of old wineries. With the tenacity of a packing peanut in a thunderstorm, they refuse to be evicted, thriving on the very boiling and chlorine that's used to dislodge them. Microwaves were tried, to little effect. New micro-organism-fighting enzymes have yet to prove their mettle.

Could they be fighting the wrong battle? What, after all, is the big hoo-ha about a cork? Tradition? The arrangement's been around only a few centuries, yet you'd think wine wasn't wine without it.

Would the same nostalgia apply to prescription cough syrup sealed this way? Corks handle the job of sterile, hermetic sealing about as well as barrel staves handle a black diamond run. The medical industry upgraded decades ago, acknowledging they were nothing but spongy resort-hotels for microbes.

And then there's the issue of extraction. It tends to relegate wine to the crab-leg and artichoke ghetto, i.e. too labor-intensive for daily use. Personally, I prefer easy access. For me, uncorking has all the romance of stopping to put on a condom.

Call me bitter: in my job you pack a corkscrew and I've now surrendered twelve to airport security. It's not the screw that irks them, it's the toy knife attached. What becomes of confiscated corkscrews, I sometimes wonder. Do they melt them all down and make a spiral staircase?

Synthetic corks are just as inconvenient. Plus, they don't form a good seal with glass; eventually they leak, or imbue the wine with a plastic whiff of Eau de Mattel.

You've arrived at the climax of this polemic: a plea for screw-caps. Oh, fine for young wine, you think, but doesn't older wine require cork to develop? It's a living thing that needs to breathe, right? Wrong and wrong again. And did I mention wrong? Aging is a reductive process, no oxygen involved. The amount the cork lets in is negligible, anyway.

Study after study shows screw-capped wine having more fruit, less oxidation and less variability than wine in cork. It matures slowly and gracefully and, best of all, contains no TCA. So while you might complain about a corked wine now, you'll never have to send one back because it's screwed.
What will it take to win over skittish drinkers? A prize under the cap (Win a Trip to the Winery!)? The convenience of storing screw-capped bottles upright, like your normal stuff? One day, corkscrews will be a collector's curiosity, along with snuffboxes and chamber pots. Until then, see if you can learn what TCA smells like, if you don't know already. You've been warned: the next cork you meet could be a killer.

If you are interested in purchasing an article for publication, please contact me via email, jester@corkjester.com .

Copyright 2007. All rights reserved.

Photo of Jennifer:
Ford Stockton McClave
Denver, CO USA 303-394-3673