We opened up a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage to find it was corked :mad: I would have returned it, but I forget where we bought it and we have no receipt.
I’m leaning towards throwing it out, but my wife insists we can cook with it. I’ve cooked with oxidized wine before and was none the worse for wear, but I’m thinking that the mouldiness of corked wine is going to ruin whatever dish we use it in. A quick internet search comes up with conflicting opinions. Has anyone cooked with corked wine or used it successfully in some other way?
Here’s my take (as a somewhat accomplished amateur cook):
Corked - no. When wine’s corked, it means that it has a particular chemical compound in it (2,4,6- trichloroanisole), which is something that comes from the cork itself- something to do with molds or chemical compounds, etc… Anyway, it gives wine a particular and unmistakeable unpleasant flavor that you wouldn’t want to cook with because your food would taste like 2,4,6- trichloroanisole as well.
However, opened wine that’s past its prime is perfectly fine to cook with, especially if you’re talking about something like an Italian red sauce or something else like a braise that’s cooked for a long time. That sort of cooking drives off most of the aromatics, and likely oxidizes the wine to some extent anyway, so using already opened wine that’s lost some of its aromatics and is a little oxidized isn’t going to hurt a thing. I might not use it to make a quick pan sauce for a delicate fish fillet, but it certainly won’t hurt in a pot of Bolognese.
Don’t get too hung up on “don’t cook with wine that you wouldn’t drink.” All that’s getting at is not to use the really salty cooking wine. It’s NOT saying that there’s any merit to the idea that if you only enjoy drinking $20/bottle wines, that you must cook with the same sort of wine. 2 Buck Chuck is just fine for cooking, even if it’s not your favorite drinking wine.
Yeah I wouldn’t cook with it. My experience is that once you train your nose to detect corkiness, it’s impossible to ignore. I wouldn’t want to risk it coming through in the food.
That said, I’m with everyone else - I often cook with wine that’s past its prime. I just throw the almost-empty bottles in the fridge and use them as I need them.
Don’t know much about wine (there are two kinds, grapes and not-grapes, end of list), but this is the very first time I have ever heard even a suggestion that screw-topped wine is better than corked wine, for cooking or for drinking. And yet that seems to be common knowledge now.
The answer, as it always seems to be, is, “It depends.” With screwcaps (stelvin closures) or, my favorite, crown caps (like you’d find on a beer), you are eliminating one big source of cork taint: the cork. But not the only one. If you train your nose to ‘look’ for cork taint, you’ll end up finding it in other things like soft drinks. The beer and wine space inside a large supermarket in Houston, which otherwise has a fantastic selection, has an area where my guess is that someone either spilled a corked wine, or someone spilled a sample of TCA, or something else, but the area around the front of the space reeks of cork taint. Even after all of the time they’ve been open. It shouldn’t smell—any TCA would’ve outgassed by now, you’d think—but it’s still there. It hasn’t affected anything I’ve bought there, to the best of my knowledge and limited TCA sensitivity.
Another thing that screwcaps affect, compared to cork closures, is the ageability of the wine. We have a lot of data on how cork-closed wines age. We don’t have as much on wines with alternative closures. Albeit, the guys in Champagne have been sealing pre-disgorgement bottles with crown caps for a very long time, and I don’t think how their wines would differ if you tried using cork to seal the bottles. Excepting them, to the best of my knowledge, the Aussies have been using screwcaps for still wines longer than anyone else, so I imagine they’d know how screwcapped wines age, how their ullage differs, if they get ullage at all, whether sediment rates are affected, bouquet development vs cork-sealed wines, etc…and there’s a bunch more differences, I’m sure. So if you’re buying something that you want to hold onto, and maybe sell to someone else for a lot more money, sometime down the road, you want some assurances that the product will develop in a similar manner.
Me, I’m not a cork fan at all. Despite the much better QC the cork industry has developed in the last 20 years or so.
You generally cannot tell till you open the bottle. But I saw a show where they used something like mass spectrography to see if really old bottles of wine had turned to vinegar, as that would affect how much they could be sold for.
No way would I use corked wine for cooking if I wouldn’t drink it.
Protip for cooking with leftover wine: freeze it in an ice cube tray, pop a few cubes into the skillet or whatever rather than letting it oxidize on your kitchen counter and then tossing it.
Glad we could help. Bummer that it was corked; I’ve gone through exactly the same thing. Hope you hadn’t cellared it for very long.
$50 for Crozes!? Which one was it? Graillot, Chapoutier, something else? It’s been a while since I was serious about wine appreciation, so maybe the prices have really changed, but fifty bucks for one makes my eyes goggle. I mean, I remember when Hermitage (not Jaboulet’s or Chave’s, but still) could go for around $50.
Oddly enough, mildly corked wine can be fixed with plastic wrap. The TCA sticks to the plastic and can be pulled out of the wine.
Also, this thread from wine spectator claims that the corked flavor is burnt off through cooking. Which makes sense, I’ve never gotten a corked wine sauce at a restaurant, nor ever heard of it happening, which seems like it would be relatively common if the corked flavor remained in cooked wine.
A relatively simple test would be to reduce the wine in half by itself and then taste it. If it’s good, add it to the rest of the sauce. If it’s not, throw it out and you haven’t wasted anything.
It was a Domain Guigal Saint Joseph. They make a very nice Cote-Rotie so when I found their Crozes-Hermitage on sale, I had to pick it up. And to be more precise, I bought it for 5,000 yen, not US dollars. We’ve narrowed it down to two shops where we could have bought the wine and unfortunately one is 500km away from us in Tokyo. We’re going to visit the other wine shop near us and see if they remember the wine.
Yeah. that seemed outrageous to me as well despite my “skin in the wine game” as of late like you profess that’s sorely lacking. I cannot imagine paying more than about thirty bucks for a Crozes-Hermitage even from a renowned producer. That is indeed Hermitage money. French wines can be bizarre given the governmental regs and considerations, but they have a lot more more practice at growing grapes and making wine then the US or other regions and there’s something to be said about elegance over power in French wines so I generally defer to their expertise (and Euro v dollar ratios!!).
“Leftover wine,
goes to my head,
makes me forget that I…”
Etc, et al…
Part of that restaurant comment about never getting a corked wine sauce is simply because even high end restaurants do not use wines of any appreciable expense to cook with in the first place. Most of the wines for cooking that I have seen have a screw cap and are larger or even jug wines. Even quasi-quaffable low cost wines like two buck chuck with a screw cap are acceptable for cooking with, especially if there’s leftovers from drinking. Hell, I would most certainly at least use the remnants of any wine I was drinking no matter the cost for cooking depending what was at hand and how long it’s been oxidizing. But the vast majority of even the high end places use low cost screw cap wines for cooking. Once a wine is incorporated into a sauce and has been heated, the nuance of a 2000 Bordeaux vs Barefoot Cabernet is utterly lost, and again: using these types of wines with the closures they have eliminates cork taint to begin with whether or not methods or cooking exists that removes it. I am not familiar with the “drawing out” of TCA using Saran Wrap but maybe there’s been developments I am unaware of.
The currency difference and shipping costs, and probable limitations on the part of the importer with regards to the US market vs the undoubtedly smaller (but thirsty!) Japanese market are likely factors.
