Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
But the 10% of the wine under cork will still have whatever the taint rate is and since those wines will likely be the wines you buy, your taint rate won't go down.
CWD: 2014 Pépière Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine Clisson
- Thread starter VLM
- Start date
Pavel Tchichikov
Pavel Tchichikov
For which wines? Take e.g. SC: some are doing brilliantly, some are a disaster. From same grape/country.
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
As I see it, that's the wrong question. The right question is what is the common feature of the ones doing brilliantly (if there is one, or more) and what is the common feature of the disasters (if there is one, or more).
In my "ideal wine world," the winemaker would decide (e.g., Jeff's write-up about Ponsot) what ingress they want, given the nature of the wine in question (as they call it), and then they pick the closure that will give them that.
For example, if a winemaker bottles the wines reduced, to minimize SO2, then an airtight SC won't do the wine any favors, and a SC designed for tiny ingress might be ideal.
As I see it, anything is better than the unpredictability of a natural cork. Not just from bacteria, but from variable ingress. It's pure Russian (wink) Roulette.
I don't think that's true. There is general acknowledgement that the rate of corked wines went up a lot in the 90s and 00s as general demand for cork went up and marginal corks went on the market. Let cork become a premium product, perhaps even subject to individual testing, and become the stopper of choice for wines for aging.
I think the same thing goes for air ingress. Just look at the corks on any somewhat decent Bordeaux - they have a solid tradition of higher quality corks - minimal veins, etc. You regularly see variable rates of wine running up the sides of corks on older wines with crappy corks, but higher quality Bordeaux style longer corks almost always have fairly uniform soaking up the sides...
Keith Levenberg
Keith Levenberg
Is there? That would be news to me and doesn't make any sense. Marginal corks can account for a lot of faults, but why would TCA be one of them? It's a chemical taint that is just as capable of infecting a good cork as a bad one.
Pavel Tchichikov
Pavel Tchichikov
How is 15 Clisson compared to the 14?
TCA taint can be drastically reduced if not eliminated by switching from chlorine-based sterilization agents to things like ozone and peroxides (reactive oxygen species) that don't introduce chlorine. My understanding is that, since the early aughties, cork manufacturers have moved away from chlorine-based sterilization agents, but I am certainly no expert on the cork industry.
Mark Lipton
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
But Mark's point doesn't go to BJ's. I have noticed less cork taint in my own cellar in bottles from around 00 and later. But whatever the percentage of corked bottles there are, there will be the same percentage if one uses fewer corks among those bottles that are under cork, which was what I said, what BJ contested, and what Keith also attested.
Jay Miller
Jay Miller
Unless part of the additional expenditure on corks includes greater testing on the part of the winery to identify tainted batches thereby reducing the percentage of tainted corks used
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
But they could do this now, I assume. I guess if wineries used only one-tenth the corks, they could do it more easily, but this still assumes an extra activity and not merely a reduction in the number of corks used.