If gasses are released in a wine bottle that’s stored on its side, won’t they build up in the air pocket that now resides somewhere far away from the cork? How do they find their way out past all the liquid?
Insert it in your rectum with a flourish so that your date will know not to blame farts on you.
Barrel aging, prior to bottling.
The presence of 2,4,6-trichloroanisole is only one of the factors in “corking” of wines, and this substance, or its precursors, don’t come exclusively from the cork.
Did you fail reading comprehension? Nowhere did I say that vintners harvest cork. However, some vintners are not careful about the grades of cork they use. Another significant factor in corking is the cleanliness of the oak barrels (if the wine is oaked); even a very small buildup of fungi can result in the wine being susceptible to corking. I’ve actually had tainted wine that was stopped with synthetic cork. I can’t remember finding one with a screwtop, but I only drink a few labels consistently that use screwtops.
Out past the cork is the only way for the excess pressure to escape; the liquid had too much cohesive tension, so the gas slowly pushes out past the cork. Too much pressure, of course, will cause the cork to pop out.
Stranger
You’re a riddler in a Champagne house, aren’t you?
I kinda figured, but I just wasn’t sure. I mean, other than a (aha! synthetic) bung, closures don’t really play a role in barrel aging. I gotcha now.
This is true but it is the main culprit. And if it is present in the wine before bottling (say from a barrel or a pallet or an entirely infected winery), then the winery should be aware of its presence and either remove it or dump the wine. I think it’s fairly obvious we are talking about TCA taint via contact with a natural cork here.
Oof, yea, missed that. My point was the cork harvesters and producers are indeed *very *careful about what they use for wine closures. It is the industry’s bread and butter. But again, the grade of the cork has no bearing on the chance of cork taint. A grade A cork has as much of a chance at being tainted as a grade D. There are some fancy new processes that claim to remove most TCA from microagglo style corks, but they are fairly new.
This is irrelevant to this discussion and just plain old sloppy winemaking. A significant factor? No. Not in any decent, hell, not even in a shitty wine would I accept that statement.
The reason winemakers find cork taint so disturbing is the insidious nature of it. There is no way for the winemaker or any cellar worker, distributor, or consumer to know whether an individual bottle of wine is tainted until it is opened, after bottling, having come in contact with a tainted cork.
Any other means of TCA being present in wine before bottling should be dealt with by the winery and never make it to market.
After working with all sorts of closures, I believe all of them have their place. Most of the wines I drink are under natural cork, but I realize that for many of those a screw cap would be just fine. Actually, the Shiraz I am drinking right now is under screw cap and is just dandy.
They all have their pros and cons.
Agreed, and there are many wines that I drink that have screwcap closures. The appeal of natural cork is largely an aesthetic one. But I also think that cork does have its place, and properly selected and processed cork is (at least at this point) better suited to wines that should be aged in the bottle. However, only a very small fraction of wines are improved by aging.
Stranger
And cheers!
sucks on a wino’s beard
Sparkling muscatel - one of the finest wines of Idaho!
The 5% I quoted was the number the industry claims. As for my own numbers, I don’t keep track of the corked wines - I was just going by gut feeling, it may be more or less than what I said. I also don’t religiously keep track of how many wines I taste in a given week/month, so I didn’t mean it to add up to 5%, I was just giving anecdotal evidence based on my memories.
I guess I find it a bit baffling that you never find corked wines, as my (and others) experience is the opposite. It’s always a big bummer to open a new wine and find it’s flawed, and it always happens more than I want it to!
(oh, and for the record - my 5-15 bottles a week are not all consumed by me! Most of them I just sample! A group of friends and I get together 1-2 times a week and everyone brings a bottle and we taste.)
How do the manmade “corks” do for such wines? The rubber/silicone/plastic/whatever ones? I like that they don’t leave crumbs of cork in the wine no matter how inept the person doing the opening (though hey, we all need more fiber in our diet, right?).
Not that we buy wine for aging, usually it’s something we’ll drink within a few weeks, but still…
They don’t. They are really only good for wines consumed within a year or two. I mostly see them in drink now reds and drink soon whites, usually in the super premium category of wines or under, the ‘fighting varietals’, etc.
They allow too much oxygen to enter, as the plastic materials just conform to the neck of the bottle, and actually shrink a bit. Unlike natural cork which maintains pressure and a good seal, as it wants to return to it’s original size/state.
I may be about to reveal myself as someone who should never have taken part in this discussion, but is it in any way possible that I’m less likely to find corked wine because I’m drinking it here, in Europe, while it’s (mostly) fairly new? Glancing in the “wine to drink casually pretty soon” cupboard, I think the oldest bottle in there is… hmm, OK, it’s a 1998 Bourgogne, but that’s the oldest in there by a few years. I wouldn’t like to hazard my memory on the age of what’s less accessible. But most of the wine in the “drink it up” cupboard is things like 2006 Chianti, bought by me from Italy. I buy most of my wine on the Continent, myself. It’s never flown. Could that have anything to do with it?
Oh well. I suppose there had to be *some *area in my life where I have good luck, and maybe this is it! I’ll count my blessings.
Agreed, and in terms of esthetics they’ve barely better than screwcaps with none of the advantages (other than being slightly cheaper than natural cork).
I also need to offer a bit of an apology and clarification; psycat90 is correct that natural cork contributes significantly to “cork spoilage” in ways that screwcaps do not. The use of screwcap closures on long-term aged wines is still something of an unknown, but for the vast majority of wines they are a technically superior closure; just one that has the esthetics of a cheap Eastern European car.
Stranger
I can’t say that I commonly drink wine much older than you do - looking at my wines, my oldest is 1999, and by far the largest # of wines in my modest collection are from 2004-2008.
I’m treading lightly here as I don’t want to offend, but is it possible that you are just not detecting corkiness? I know it took me a while to learn & recognize it, and my husband was laughing at himself last night because back before he drank much wine, he thought the cork smell was a distinctive odor of an older wine, and meant it was a really great wine. There are also degrees of corkiness; some wine is only very slightly corked and if you weren’t familiar with the smell, chances are you wouldn’t detect it.
Don’t worry about offending on that score. I’m not claiming to be an expert. Sure it’s possible, though I have a pretty sensitive palate and a very good sense of smell (remind me why I work with teenagers?!). I’m extremely sensitive to mouldy, mildewy or musty smells in general, can’t bear to have a dog in the house, and as I say, I have experienced a corked wine, just not in my own personal consumption. But yes, it’s possible that I’ve been lucky not to ever have a wine corked enough for me to notice, rather than never any corked wine at all. I don’t think so though (obviously)!
Bryan Ekers:
Just had to chime in to let you know that someone appreciated this post.
Hey man, no apology needed, but appreciated nonetheless. I might have geeked out a little bit. Cheers!
And I agree, most screw caps are butt ugly. There are a few out there that are pretty decent looking though. Here’s one next to a standard cork finish bottle with a foil. Not too shabby.
But like I said, I see the pros and cons in all of the different closures.
Cork requires a tool, contributes to tainted wine, can be pricey, but is also a biodegradable, natural, and sustainable product.
Screw caps protect the wine from taint and oxidation and require no tool. And while the caps themselves may be less expensive than natural cork, when you take into consideration the glass and machinery required to apply them, they can be fairly comparable in price overall. The raw materials, manufacture, and transport also contributes to their having a carbon footprint more than double that of natural cork and synthetics as well. But they are recyclable.
And I don’t care one bit about any ‘romance’ or ‘ritual’ involved with opening or being served a wine. As long as the wine in the bottle (or bag or box or can or keg) tastes good, I’m a happy camper. 
When I read this thread I thought of this article.
That’s a dramatic photo to me. Every wine store should have a copy of it and show it to people who refuse to buy screw cap enclosed wines.
I for one dislike the synthetic corks, I find them quite difficult to get out and impossible to put back in (on those rare occasions I might need to do so) - but even moreso, as the article points out, the reliability of them as a good closure is the lowest of all closure options.
Having read this article, and being almost totally ignorant about wines, it raises a question. The article noted that the screw cap wines age well, and have these favorable taste characteristics that they should (it seems) for that long a period in the bottle. So, how are they judging this – if the vast majority of wine has been aged with corks, shouldn’t the ‘standard’ taste of 10 year old wine be, er, worse? Shouldn’t this screw cap wine set a whole new standard that hadn’t been possible previously?
It’s a plot, I say! Wine Caps