Hopefully, Not a New Trend

C

Claude Kolm

Claude Kolm
From 8-12% in the late 1990s, the rate of corked wines I've been experienced has dropped dramatically down to 1-2%. But tonight, I opened two 2010 German Rieslings from different producers and regions, one dry and one a Spätlese, and both had some cork issues -- one just wasn't quite right and the other totally mute. At a 2% random rate, the odds against this tonight were 1/2500.
 
I agree the cork rate among conscientious producers is admirably lower than it once was. That said, I opened 3 corked bottles in a row one night about 2 years back... I guess it has to happen to someone :(
 
For what it's worth, it's difficult for most producers to gather much in the way of valid cork taint data. You can make observations, try to infer from # of complaints, etc, but it's hard to rely on second hand reports.

That said, we buy very high quality corks from a reputable producer, the best that we think we can find. We don't track cork data on every bottle we open, but we do open large numbers of bottles at a time 2x / year when we have open houses, and I tend to open all those bottles ahead of time to let them aerate and prescreen for tca. Of the last 240-250 bottles opened, 2 have been corked and 1 has been otherwise off / flat / just not right.
 
Isn't QC for producers all about doing your own testing? Fifteen years ago, Ridge was putting samples of new cork lots into jars with relatively neutral white wines (pinot grigio, maybe?) overnight, then tasting them blind. If you do enough of this, it's not so hard to do real statistics.

Of course, in those days, the returned lots of bad corks totally found someone else's wines.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
Isn't QC for producers all about doing your own testing? Fifteen years ago, Ridge was putting samples of new cork lots into jars with relatively neutral white wines (pinot grigio, maybe?) overnight, then tasting them blind. If you do enough of this, it's not so hard to do real statistics.

Of course, in those days, the returned lots of bad corks totally found someone else's wines.
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Pascal Delbeck in the mid-1990s, then at Ch“teau Ausone, told me that the cork companies were training producers to test that way for a 5% rate as acceptable for corked bottles. In other words, the cork companies themselves were deciding what was an acceptable failure rate, and it is only with the onset of alternative closures that they have begun to clean up their act.

Follow-up on the initial post: I opened a third bottle, a 2009 Bourgogne-Vézelay and it was fine, dropping the odds significantly, I thought, until I noticed that the seal was a DIAM.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
Isn't QC for producers all about doing your own testing? Fifteen years ago, Ridge was putting samples of new cork lots into jars with relatively neutral white wines (pinot grigio, maybe?) overnight, then tasting them blind. If you do enough of this, it's not so hard to do real statistics.

Of course, in those days, the returned lots of bad corks totally found someone else's wines.
Click to expand...

Soaking N corks in vodka or light white wine and sniffing for TCA is a good way to deduce how many of those N corks contained TCA but not a good way to know how many of your bottles out there in the market are eventually cork tainted.

It's not without value, but it's certainly neither foolproof nor readily statistically applicable.
 
originally posted by Josh Beck:


It's not without value, but it's certainly neither foolproof nor readily statistically applicable.
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Not foolproof, I'm sure, but if you do it before you use the corks you should be able to forecast the taint levels from a particular batch and reject ones that exceed your threshold. And perhaps to pick up non-TCA cork contaminants as well.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
How many times have you opened two bottles in one evening? Perhaps this was your 2500th night. Could just be coincidence.
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That's why I titled the thread "Hopefully, Not a New Trend."
 
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