Rate of corked wines

originally posted by nigel groundwater:

How and by whom was the “all at about 2 ppt” of the Vermentino determined?
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A sample of at least 3 bottles tested at ETS, a lab in Napa (the same lab the Cork types use). At least some batches of Altec appeared to have had bad cork evenly mixed with good, so every bottle in the batch was tainted.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Oliver McCrum:

Corks are way better than they used to be, everyone appears to agree. Are they good enough, though?
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Good enough for what, Oliver? They make good bulletin boards and trivets.

Mark Lipton
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Good point, sorry to malign the perfect material for bulletin boards and trivets.
 
Nigel,

The method used to arrive at their number is apparently:

'For a typical lot of 100,000 corks CQC guidelines require a minimum sample of 250 corks taken from a selection of at least five separate bales. These corks are placed in 50-cork wine soaks for 24 hours to extract releasable TCA. Resulting soaks are analyzed at ETS Laboratories using a method that reports TCA at concentrations as low as 1 part per trillion. If one of the five soaks indicates TCA as high as 1.5ppt the entire cork lot is flagged and withheld from inventory.'

This means that the results are of soaks of 50 corks. So the real question is, I think, how many corks are over 2ppt if the whole lot tests at 2ppt?

Could one of you math types tell me? Is that enough information to have any idea, even?
 
originally posted by Oliver McCrum:
originally posted by nigel groundwater:

How and by whom was the “all at about 2 ppt” of the Vermentino determined?
Click to expand...

A sample of at least 3 bottles tested at ETS, a lab in Napa. At least some batches of Altec appeared to have had bad cork evenly mixed with good, so every bottle in the batch was tainted.
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Thank you for the reference. As you know ETS are part of the CQC programme.

The main problem with the Altec iirc was that the threshold parameters they built into the process were just too high and it therefore didn't ensure that TCA was essentially removed.

As a result any TCA present was more widely distributed by the grinding of the cork into a flour before it was reconstituted into individual corks.

I am surprised that the bottles tested were as low as 2 ppt.
 
The main problem with Altec, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it ruined large amounts of wine. As a small importer/distributor I lost hundreds of cases, I can't imagine what the total losses were.
 
The larger picture here is surely that all of us love an artisanal product, and we accept variation in that product from year to year or even from bottle to bottle, since such variation is inherent in artisanal production. But should we accept any noticeable amount of spoilage due to the packaging? Do we accept such variation in any other product?
 
originally posted by Oliver McCrum:
The larger picture here is surely that all of us love an artisanal product, and we accept variation in that product from year to year or even from bottle to bottle, since such variation is inherent in artisanal production. But should we accept any noticeable amount of spoilage due to the packaging? Do we accept such variation in any other product?
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Coffee beans, tea leaves, cheeses etc. The problem is that conscientious purveyors of these foodstuffs can and do filter the spoiled products before selling on. Unfortunately that doesn't seem possible for cork-stoppered wine.
 
originally posted by Yixin:
Unfortunately that doesn't seem possible for cork-stoppered wine.
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I think coffee beans are shipped in bulk most of the time and only packaged locally. Fourrier (et al.) doesn't ship barrels to the US....
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Fourrier (et al.) doesn't ship barrels to the US....
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Back in the old days (i.e., until the 1970s), when they did ship barrels, mostly to UK (although there were some classified Bordeaux wines that Ridge bottled, and going back even further, one saw Belgian-bottled wines, too), it was because it was believed (by some, at least) that the wines would be more reliably handled there than in France. Sometimes true, sometimes not (if you are familiar with some of the old Avery's Burgundies, opinions can differ dramatically about the truth of that statement).
 
originally posted by Oliver McCrum:
I'm sorry, Yixin, I meant 'Do we accept such variation due to packaging in any other product?'
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Insofar as most coffee beans, tea leaves and cheeses are quite fucked because of poor handling, we seem to.

How many roasters have proper valves on their bags? Most of them don't even degas properly after roasting.

Don't get me started on tea handling.

Cheeses are too often suffocated.
 
originally posted by Oliver McCrum:
The main problem with Altec, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it ruined large amounts of wine. As a small importer/distributor I lost hundreds of cases, I can't imagine what the total losses were.
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Well of course that would explain your total rejection of cork then.

Fed up with cork you turned to a synthetic cork-based product only to find that it was even worse. Of course the major natural cork company that was Sabate was ruined by Altec but has morphed into another company following mergers/acquisition that now makes the DIAM range of corks [and screwcaps et al] which seems to be making the most headway in traditional markets where natural cork is still the major closure.

However to put a finer point on it the main problem with Altec was that it was engineered to tolerances that were too lax

The TCA threshold they considered acceptable was too high and this resulted in TCA being in far more closures than would have occurred naturally - and at levels that were still detectable. Not necessarily recognised by smell although that happened too but detectable in terms of the impact of incipient TCA on the way the wine presented.

For DIAM they have set the bar very much higher [much lower TCA] such that they feel able to offer a guarantee concerning TCA.

The major natural cork producers also upped their game setting much lower thresholds which have clearly resulted in a major reduction in TCA problems with their products viz this thread and many others.
However the super-critical CO2 process [similar to the one used to de-caffeinate coffee] allows DIAM to offer a guarantee although thus far it can only be used on small pieces of cork requiring it then to be reduced to a flour which is combined with microspheres by food-grade glue to produce a product engineered to finer quality parameters than the Altec on which it is based.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by nigel groundwater:
food-grade glue
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And what does that stuff have for extractables?
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I'm not sure what [or why] you are asking me Joe but perhaps DIAM who use it will know since they have given certain guarantees about their product.

I have no axe to grind on DIAM's behalf or indeed for any closure believing that winemakers are [generally] the most likely to understand how to make their wines in order to work best with the closures they choose. For example Fourrier [natural cork from a specialist in Corsica] and Ponsot [a radical plastic technical cork with MIT involvement in the design] have been outspoken on the issue of closures and have opted for radically different solutions.

After gradually starting with DIAMs for their basic wines some years ago before [cautiously] including their 1er Crus and now finally their Grand Crus William Fevre [and I assume the Bouchard 'parent'] has moved entirely to DIAM.

Down Under moved largely to screwcap but a few producers moved back to cork or DIAM apparently because their wines did not 'suit' the new closure. Meanwhile the screwcap has been developed to include a range of liners with specified oxtrans performance in addition to the almost impermeable original tin liner which is nevertheless still in use.

There has been a wide range of steadily improving closures of all types available for years now and the best producers will continue to conduct their own studies [like Fourrier and Ponsot, the Bordeaux 1sts and many others like Penfolds in Australia] and make decisions on which closures will complete the 'packaging' of their wines best. No doubt concern about market acceptance rather than purely science-based judgements continues to play a part although that may have started to become less of an issue. I wonder if Ponsot conducted any market research before he went 100% for the Ardeaseal.

As for DIAM they presumably needed something to re-assemble their super-cleaned cork flour and I assume they recognised that the material they chose had to meet food standards. They presumably also looked at all the preceding evidence from the Altec debacle and the glues used for the large number of agglomerated corks already in service.

They already have some years of experience with their DIAM champagne cork the Mytik which quite a number of Houses are using. If an 'extractable' was going to be a problem it might have surfaced early there.
 
originally posted by nigel groundwater:
originally posted by Oliver McCrum:
The main problem with Altec, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it ruined large amounts of wine. As a small importer/distributor I lost hundreds of cases, I can't imagine what the total losses were.
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Well of course that would explain your total rejection of cork then.
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Non sequitur.
 
Nigel,

My question was rhetorical.

I was worried about extractables from a health POV more than an aesthetic one. Plenty of "food grade" items out there that may well not be good for you.
 
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