Cork taint explained, partially

[MLipton]

TCA suppresses the odors of wine

I think that this also accounts for the phenomenon of "fruit scalping," in which a low level TCA taint simply renders the wine devoid of smell.

Science at your service yet again!
Mark Lipton

 

[SFJoe]

This has always seemed to be the way it had to be. I had a long discussion about it with Stuart Firestein to try to get him to work on it.

DEET seems to do the same thing to mosquitoes, btw.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

Interesting. Thanks, M'k.

Apparently, there is more work to do: Takeuchi and her colleagues still haven't determined what makes us think some items contaminated with TCA smell bad. They hypothesize that the brain interprets the reduction of CNG channel activity or the suppression of output from ORCs as an odor.