How do you tell wine that’s corked from wine that is just really bad?
Wine that’s turned usually smells/tastes moldy or musty, like your grandmother’s basement. Sometimes it can be vinegary.
Otherwise whether wine is “just bad” is largely a matter of taste.
I agree: I’ve only had one bottle that was corked, and it was incredibly musty. It wasn’t subtle–there was no question that something had gone wrong.
My wife and I had gone to a small winery in western Wisconsin and tasted a few wines. One was particularly good, and was on sale. So we bought some
However, after opening it we discovered that it was corked. It had a dusty, mold & mildew like taste to it and was definitely off from what we tasted.
I’ve been told that up to 5% of all wine corks are contaminated with the chemical that causes this. So keep your receipt!
Like the others have said, “cork” is a distinctive smell & taste - once you recognize it, it’s hard to miss.
Slight hijack, but why do waiters still insist on pouring a tasting shot with bottles that use screwcaps? Can a screwcap wine still get corked?
Another good reason for taking a sip before a whole glass is poured would be to check the temperature of the wine. If you have ordered a bottle of white, and it tastes too cold, you don’t want the waiter to leave it in an ice bucket. If your choice is red, and it is too warm, you could wait for the wine to adjust to room temperature, or you may wish to reject it.
I would always turn down a red that is too cold. This used to happen occasionally on visits to the Greek islands, where some restaurants would keep a red in the refrigerator.
In Texas, unfortunately, the problem is often the opposite, with reds being served much too warm. I have received strange looks before when I’ve asked for an ice bucket for the red wine.
For the OP,Cork taint, as distinct from the wine being oxidized, poorly stored, or just plain poorly made, comes from several sets of microorganisms that convert chlorine and chlorophenols into TCA. TCA is 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, a benzene ring with a methoxy group and chlorine at the ortho and para positions. Since it originates from chlorine, using chlorine in food processing, like in bleach for instance, may lead to TCA showing up in a variety of non-wine cork applications. I’ve picked it up once while sipping a Diet Coke. And I want to say I remember smelling it in a wine sealed with an artificial cork once. So, I imagine it’s certainly possible that TCA could show up in a screw-capped wine, but very highly improbable, and much less likely than in the 0.7-1% (APCOR’s figures–cork industry body) to 5% (my anecdotal evidence) likelihood.
We smell TCA in the parts per trillion, unfortunately. People’s sensitivity varies dramatically. My ex-wife could smell cork taint in wine where I never noticed it, except to note that this particular bottle had less fruit than others I’d had. Which brings up another point, in high doses, TCA is easy to diagnose. It smells to me like wet moldy newspaper or cardboard. At lower doses, it’s hard to pick up that smell, but the TCA will still be acting to “mute” the flavors of the wine.
How to tell that from the wine otherwise being “off”? Well, TCA is just a sub-set of causes for the wine being off, and the entire set leads to the same result—send the wine back because it is not to your liking—so I’m not sure that you need to distinguish causes in the outlier cases where you can’t smell mold. You’re the customer; the restaurant/merchant should want to try and make you happy. The merchant can apply for credit for the defective bottle and so can the restaurant, or the restaurant can try to sell the bottle by the glass if they feel the wine’s suitable, but just not to your liking (See: old sauternes, rhones, other wines that smell like poop in a good way or have an odd color.) I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you don’t like it, feel free to send it back and tell your server what your tastes are. It’s about customer service, after all.
I’d be happy if the wine industry went wholesale with crown caps, like are on beer. If they’re good enough to age Champagne on lees for 50 years, they’re good enough to safeguard my Mosels and Montelena.
They say it’s not at all uncommon, but I drink a lot of wine and I’ve never gotten a corked bottle. I supopse I lead a charmed life.
Gray Ghost answered well - Cork taint is just one flaw that could be present in the wine, there are many others, so making sure the wine is suitable is always good practice, no matter how it is sealed.
A wine *can *become tainted by TCA before it is ever bottled, by oak barrels, wooden tanks, etc. It can be present in a winery - there was a winery in this area that had to shut down for months and completely scrub the place down before they could begin operations again. But it’s unlikely a wine tainted before it is bottled will ever make it to market, as the winery would just dump it.
Which is what makes taint from corks so insidious, even with better pre-screening procedures, there’s still no way to know when it will occur. You can only be certain that it will occur. And as a winemaker, a valid fear is the TCA tainted bottle and a consumer unfamiliar with it. Even when it’s not obviously detectable by smell, it will still mute the flavors. Consumer simply says “I don’t like this wine” and the winery just lost a potential repeat customer.
As a consumer the best thing to do is to educate yourself to the telltale aroma already described - old newspaper, musty, wet cardboard, moldy basement, etc. Sometimes it’s faint, sometimes it’s incredibly overwhelming, and anywhere in between.
I can smell it at about 5 ppm, and I smell it often. Unfortunately where I run into it the most often is at bars, presumably due to barkeeps wiping down the wooden bars with mixtures of bleach and water. It often interferes with my enjoyment of whatever it is I happen to be drinking, usually beer.
We probably run into a corked wine out of every 20 or 30 bottles we drink. The last one was just a few weeks ago at a party we hosted.