Pouring money down the drain: how do you recognize a “corked” wine or a bottle that is spoiled? And what do you do if you have one? Drain cleaner comes to mind.
Bad Bottles
Anticipating a treat, I opened a fairly expensive white wine last week. The vintage was 2000; the producer an important estate in the Burgundy region and a respected name in the international marketplace. The label did not indicate the grape variety, but that is the way with almost all premium French wines. You are expected to know that chardonnay is the predominant white grape of Burgundy, and you should assume that any white wine from a prestigious and traditional source will be chardonnay or a proprietary blend with chardonnay dominating.
When I smelled the wine it turned out to be not like any chardonnay I knew—or would want to know, and not at all a treat. I had to ask myself, was the wine past its peak, stored too long in my basement? Or was it corked? Or oxidized? One or a combination of these defects is the main reason why a wine does not taste as you would expect it should.
A “corked” wine is one that has been contaminated by a chemical compound called TCA, and the source is almost always the cork, a natural, biological material subject to spoliation of various sorts. A corked wine might be slightly unpleasant, just off enough to be unappealing, or it might be downright foul, depending on the extent of contamination. It is not harmful as far as we know.
How do you recognize it? Think of a leaky East Hampton basement a few days after a Northeaster. Telltale signs are the musty, moldy smells that come from rotting or mildewed materials. And the taste may be lifeless and dull. Corked or oxidized whites may even have a cloying, candied quality. These characteristics can range from marginal to extreme.
What do you do with a corked bottle? Drain cleaner is the term sometimes used by wine professionals. Pour it right into the kitchen sink, at least if it is a wine you’re had around for a while. If it is a wine you’ve recently bought, take it back to your wine merchant. All reputable retailers will make good. And if you are in a restaurant, speak up. The entire and only point in tasting a wine in a restaurant when the server opens it is to see if it is flawed. It is not to determine if it suits your tastes and preferences. Just the way you would not order fish and taste it and then decide you’d rather have steak, you are not entitled to return a wine that you, even with the sommelier’s advice, have chosen even if you are disappointed. There is only one reason, and that is that the wine has a defect.
It can certainly happen that if you trying an unfamiliar wine, you might find unexpected tastes that are not your ideal but that objectively belong there. If you are not sure—sometimes a wine can be faintly corked, in an uncertain range—by all means ask the server or sommelier for an opinion. I’ve found that the few times I’ve been in that situation, the sommelier preferred to open another bottle of the same wine and compare. I’m glad to say I was correct each time in questioning the soundness of the first bottle. You’ve got to use your nose and palate, and use them discerningly. Neither the physical condition of the cork, nor traces of white tartrate crystals, nor crumbled bits of cork from a difficult opening, is an indicator of a corked bottle.
Feeling betrayed but still hopeful, I let my faded white Burgundy sit for a few minutes, but the patient was dead and showed no interest in springing back to life. It is not the first defective bottle I’ve poured down the drain. When you drink enough wine, you know it is going to happen once in a while.
The answer to corked bottles on an industry level is to use less cork. I am not wild about plastic “corks.” They are very difficult to extract for one thing. I like screw caps, especially for fragrant whites. They totally eliminate the problem, and make a lot of sense. I often take that into consideration when buying a wine, trying to encourage producers who use them.
