Quality of the cork

The cork closure has been around since the Roman days. There’s a whole mystique wrapped

around pulling the cork out of a bottle of wine. What corkscrew to use, how to hold the

bottle, do I look at or smell the cork and the list just goes on. Most of it’s rubbish.

The cork is there to seal the bottle and that’s just about it.

As well as corks leaking or drying out we can have the problem of a ‘corked’ bottle.

Unfortunately there’s not much you can do to control this.

Wine becomes ‘corked’ or tainted when a chemical called tri-chloro-anisole (TCA) combines

with chlorine in the bleach used to sanitize the corks. TCA arises from moulds naturally

occurring in the tree bark. It is virtually impossible to detect a mouldy cork before it’s put

into the bottle.

A severely corked bottle is easy to pick. It will smell like damp carpet or a flooded cellar.

It gives that musty unpleasant smell. And this is fine because you can pick straight away

that something is wrong with the bottle.

A lightly corked bottle presents a bigger problem. The wine will smell flat and taste dull.

There’ll be no fruit nose and no fruit flavour. The average wine drinker will assume that this

is how the wine is supposed to taste. The reputation of the winery suffers through

something they have no knowledge of or control over. A no win situation.

Wineries responded to this problem by using synthetic corks by the millions. The cork

industry responded by spending millions on research to find the cause and cure for cork

taint. A chlorine free cork treatment process was developed and this has helped greatly.

Anecdotal evidence says up to 8% of bottles had

cork taint a few years ago.Now, that’s down to below

2% which is a great news.It’s the natural properties

of the cork that make it

so useful as a closure for wine bottles.

from:www.vinote.com