This week's Netscape Forum poll: How much wine is cork-tainted?

[Robin Garr]

Poll: How much wine is cork-tainted?
Historically - including my own experience - a solid 5 percent of all commercial wine under natural cork stoppers has been "corked," irreparably tainted by the presence of a chemical nicknamed TCA that's usually associated with problematic corks. This enduring problem has prompted a growing shift toward alternative closures in recent years, but to its credit, at least some players in the natural cork industry have taken steps to minimize the incidence of taint. This week's Netscape WineLovers Community seeks a rough measure of the current situation, as we ask you to estimate what percentage of the wines you open nowadays suffer from cork taint.

<b>Click here to vote!

(Note that it is generally not necessary to log in to the Netscape forum to vote in polls; you'll have to log in if you wish to comment there, but please feel free also to post comments in this thread.)

I shouldn't be pedantic .... however
What you're actually measuring is your tolerance or threshold to cork taint (TCA). TCA is often present in miniscule quantities, such that we can't detect it.

Meanwhile some people are ultra sensitive to it, and others either can't spot it, or are quite tolerant.

Thus I believe people will be measuring the proportion of bottles that have a level of taint they can detect.

Sorry to be a pedant

regards

Ian

[Robin Garr]

Sorry to be a pedant

No need to apologize, Ian! Without pedantry, the traffic on this (and most other) Internet forums would be much less.

As a generalist, though, I'm satisfied with my broad, coarse approximations.

To continue with the pedantry: I've noted every corked bottle I come across on my web site. Currently the total is "only" at 2% (though this is too much also). But as most of the wines I taste are at big tastings, usually the corked bottles will be removed before I get to try the wine. Also I am not very sensitive to cork taint so I am sure that in reality it is higher that 2%. Screwcaps rock!

Ian, I wonder if someone could create a website where TCA interested folks could contribute X amount to join, which would be enough to pay for randomly testing a statistically significant number of bottles via chromatography, on regular intervals, to keep a running log to see if the corkers are making any headway in cleaning up their acts. Some number could be accepted at which an average bloke can detect TCA (four parts per trillion?) to represent pass or fail.

Covert

Covert
They could - however this feels to be right in the realms of (wine) universities or perhaps the cork industry (but frankly they've got a way to go to re-earn our trust in their "facts").
Maybe UC Davis would be interested? Otherwise probably only the big producers have the incentive to do it.
regards
Ian

I can pretty much count on 1-2 per month, which works out to about 8%. At that level, I'm a strong supporter of Stelvin.

I came across this debate on Jamie goode`s website. Pretty intense!

http://www.wineanorak.com/oeneo_closure ... e_2006.pdf