24. Diving Into Cork Taint!

Anshu: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Wineitupanotch Podcast, a podcast where we talk about wine, life, and everything in between. My name is Anshu, I'm your host and I'm thrilled that you've decided to join me today. Thank you for doing so. 

 Welcome to Episode 24 of the podcast. 

It's early in the morning today it's actually quite quiet in my house. I've grabbed my recording device and decided to record first thing in the morning while everybody's still sleeping and, it's much quieter than it usually is, even though I do typically record when nobody's in the home but today with everybody sleeping and it being an early hour, it's just very dreamy, relaxed, quiet, and I thought today I would talk about something that I think sometimes people can struggle with and maybe not even recognize. But this happened to me not too long ago and it made me file the idea away as something that I wanted to talk about on the podcast, and that is the idea of wine faults.

 [00:01:00]Now, when I say most people don't really recognize wine faults, what I mean  there is that wine faults can come in a range of, let's call it sizes and shapes and types. And actually I've done a blog article on the most common wine faults that present themselves in wine. I will link that in the show notes.

But, you know, I find that most people are not that confident identifying if a wine is faulted, including myself, unless the wine is very obviously off. Now, sometimes you'll have a wine and it'll be very, very obviously affected by cork taint or it'll have oxidized to a point where it's clear that the wine itself is bad.

 So let me explain that just a little bit for people who may be newer to wine and just learning some of these concepts. 

An oxidized wine is a wine that has seen exposure to oxygen and too much of it. So effectively the wine has - either over time or through the wine making process just been exposed to too much oxygen and it is no [00:02:00] longer a fresh, fruity wine.

 This can happen when a wine has aged for a long time and, through the cork and just the passage of time there has been exposure to oxygen. It can also happen if you open a bottle and leave it lying around on the counter for too long. if you revisit a wine after 2, 3, 4 days, you'll find that it tastes flat and doesn't really have the same flavor that you were expecting it to have. 

 But it can also happen because while the wine was being made, there has been inadvertent exposure to oxygen. So that's when a wine would be called oxidized and then there are also wine faults associated with the use of sulfur, which I hope at this stage a lot of people would recognize - is a very common additive, not only in wine, but in a lot of foods. It's a natural preservative, it's used to control disease, and spoilage. So I know a lot of people don't like the idea of sulfites in wine, but there are sulfites in wine and the use of sulfur is pretty prevalent throughout the winemaking process in [00:03:00] conventional wine making and sometimes the over usage of sulfur and sulfites can cause a wine to develop certain faults as well. Of course, if you're into natural wines where sulfur and sulfites are not used, then you're probably okay. However, When I say you're probably okay, I mean that you're unlikely to encounter a sulfur related fault.

However, as I said, in most conventional wine making, it is something that presents itself. 

The third type of wine fault that we see quite commonly is resulting from TCA or cork taint. And as I said, I have explained these three wine faults and a few others in a blog post, which I will link in the notes, but today I wanted to talk a little bit more about TCA or cork taint related fault and what to look for. 

 What happened with me was that I opened a bottle of wine and I found that the wine was still youthful, not [00:04:00] obviously off, but it was lacking a little bit of a fruit flavour. 

So this was a Pais (wine) from Chile.

 I'm not going to bother mentioning who the producer was or what the wine bottle was, because that's not the objective here. I'm not looking to try to name and shame anybody. Instead, I just want to talk about the idea of a wine that should be very fruity and fresh when you open the bottle but actually does not taste that way; it tastes rather dull. 

So the pais grape actually is also known as a mission grape. It's a traditional indigenous grape to Chile, and the wines that are produced from the pais grape are typically very fresh, very fruity, lots of ripe red fruit, berry flavors, floral flavors. Um, they're not necessarily wines that are meant to be aged for long periods of time, and they're just, fresh, fruity, cheerful, almost. They can have complexity -there's some earthiness to them - but they are not, deep, rich, [00:05:00] terribly complex wines that may not be, as fruity or approachable in their youth.

 Now, I had bought a couple of bottles of a wine made from the pais grape from a producer that I really like and I tried a bottle a few months ago and really enjoyed it. And I have, three other bottles left in my cellar, or I should say had three other bottles left in my cellar. So two weeks ago, I decided I would have another bottle, and when I opened the bottle, everything appeared okay.

I poured some wine into my glass. It presented visually as I was expecting it to. I swirled it, I smelled it. I noticed that it didn't really have as bright a smell as I was expecting, but I thought, you know, maybe the wine just needs to breathe a little bit. And then when I went to try the wine, that's when I noticed that it really tasted quite different than my expectations.

 It didn't have that bright floral fruit forward stance that I was expecting on the palate. It tasted quite muted, in fact, almost dull. [00:06:00] Many of the flavors that I was expecting, such as, red floral notes, red berry notes, a little bit of earthiness, some of the warm baking spices -they were there but the fruit notes and the floral notes were, as I said, quite muted and the wine just felt dull. 

 And I first doubted myself, because. -that I think is the point I'm trying to make - I think oftentimes until you build up confidence and a lot of exposure, it's not uncommon to think that, maybe it's something that's wrong with yourself when you're trying a wine and it's not tasting exactly the way you're expecting it to.

 So I doubted myself. I thought maybe the wine needed a little bit more exposure to air. I let it aerate in the glass. I went back to it. I went back to it with food. And while the wine was not terribly offensive, very obviously off, I did finally decide that the wine was not what it was supposed to be. 

It was not undrinkable.

I did drink more, because I had opened the bottle and wanted to enjoy it with my meal. [00:07:00] But the point I'm making is that it certainly wasn't at its best. 

So I did a little bit of research and reminded myself that the presence of the mold or fungi that causes,TCA or cork taint can actually cause muted flavors within a wine. 

 Let's just break this down a little bit. So, cork taint is a fault and it's chiefly caused by the presence of chemical compounds, which are called TCA for short, but in full form are 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole. And essentially what happens is in very, very small amounts, essentially a mold will be created in the wine, and just the smallest presence of TCA can cause damage within a wine. 

When the taint associated with this particular compound is prevalent, the odors, that produce themselves in the wine can be very, very prevalent as well, and they're often associated with a dank [00:08:00] basement, so a wet basement or wet cardboard

and that's how you'll hear wine professionals describing cork taint. 

But in smaller amounts or less prevalent cork taint, you get a significant reduction of the primary flavors of the wine. And I think it's this latter part that a lot of people maybe don't think about it in the first instance.

 I would say some people may not know at all. Some people may be aware through studying such as myself. I'm someone who studied wine, so we may be aware that TCA can cause muted fruit flavors, but it's not something that we think of right away. Instead, we're looking for the aromas that I just described in terms of mouldy newspaper, damp basement, even a wet dog or bandaid kind of smell. not thinking that if a wine is less fruity, when it should be quite fruity because it's very youthful still, that that in fact could be cork taint as well. 

So as I said, drinking the wine for a little bit and emboldening myself, if you will, to [00:09:00] rely on my own sense of knowledge and my own intuition, I did come to the conclusion that the wine was not at its optimal performance. 

Now, the thing with TCA is when the taint is really an issue, the wine can become highly unpleasant, but it's not harmful, and in the same way when the taint is not that prevalent, the wine is certainly still drinkable, though, not highly enjoyable. So I didn't harm myself in the making of this particular podcast episode, nor in the drinking of the wine. Don't worry, I'm fine. I probably, you know, still, I would say enjoyed the glass of wine that I was having in the sense that it was not terrible with the meal that I was having, but I just didn't enjoy it optimally.

And as I said, I thought I would jump on the podcast, do a quick episode about this, and just remind everybody that wine is a natural substance. It is made from fruit at the end of the day, and with natural substances by people who are artists at the [00:10:00] end of the day and doing the best that they can. But in the winemaking process, in the shipping and handling, in all of the elements that go into it, things can go awry and there is a relatively high percentage of wines that end up being faulted in some way more than most people would expect, I think. 

So if you're having a wine and you're finding that it's not giving you a fresh, fruity flavor, consider whether it might be affected (unfortunately) by cork taint. 

Remember that at a restaurant, when a wine is presented to you by a wine steward or a sommelier to taste, it is so that you can taste for freshness and ensure that the wine is good.

And if you have some doubts, you can always ask somebody to try it, someone who's a professional and let them know. That you're not sure that the wine is fresh. and see what they think. 

And if you've bought it from a wine store and you're feeling that the wine is not fresh, it's not presenting the primary fruit flavors that you're expecting, take it back and suggest that it might be tainted because life is too short to drink bad wine.

And if you're not enjoying the wine in your [00:11:00] glass, you shouldn't keep drinking it!

So with that, I'll bring this episode to a close. I've said a lot here. I think in summary, I just want to say that there's two major takeaways that I'd like people to walk away from this episode with. 

 One, the notion that wine is a natural product and can be faulted when you open the bottle and cork taint, Is a relatively prevalent taint still, even though a lot of advancements have been made, and certainly the instances of cork taint have come down significantly, but it is still a problem in the world of wine. 

 So that's one takeaway. 

 And the second takeaway is that, if you're finding that you're drinking a young wine that should be fresh and fruity, either based on the grapes, based on the vintage, or based on the style, or even based on your previous exposure with the wine, 

 and you're finding that it's not presenting in the same way, then consider if it might either have been tainted through TCA or been [00:12:00] oxidized and do not continue to drink a wine that is not presenting the way that you expect it to. 

 So with that, I will bring this episode to a close. It's a short one, but an important one predicated on my recent experience. And as I said, if I'm experiencing this, I'm sure others are too. I hope you found this knowledge helpful and useful, and I hope that it will help you to be more confident with your wine knowledge and in your wine drinking.

 And with that, I will wish you lots of peace, love, light, and of course, good wine. 
Until next time, see you later.