By Matthew DeBord
HQ 68 | SUMMER/AUTUMN 2009
It was one of those awkward moments. My wife and I were having dinner at some friends’ house. The host opened a bottle of red wine, poured some glasses and then … I gave it a whiff. Then a taste. There was something … not quite right. It had a musty aroma and a bit of a funky flavor. It was obvious to me, having tasted thousands of wines at this point, that the wine was “corked,” not meaning how the wine is bottled, but that the wine had gone bad.
My ironclad rule about encountering corked wines at the homes of friends who aren’t necessarily into wine is to keep my mouth shut and wait for the next bottle. Often, someone else will bring up the problem and the situation will resolve on its own. When I’m at the home of somebody who really knows wine, I’ll usually bring it up. Corked is corked, and most oenophiles accept that a certain number of bad bottles are going to creep into their wine-drinking life.
Restaurants are a completely different story. There’s a reason why the waiter or sommelier offers you a small taste of the wine before pouring it. You’re supposed to judge whether the wine has gone “off.” If you think it has, protocol dictates that you ask the server for his or her opinion. If the server disagrees, but you think the wine is flawed, stick to your guns. You’re entitled to a fresh bottle.
Of course, corked wine is only one of several problems you can encounter when savoring the pleasures of the vine. It’s generally the most common, however. Often called “cork taint,” a corked wine has been contaminated with an organic chemical compound called TCA. This substance can affect the wine at various stages in the winemaking process. The winemaking facility can be unsanitary, or the barrels in which the wine was fermented or aged can be tainted. But usually, it’s the cork that’s to blame.
A corked wine will almost always smell … weird. The typical malodorous qualities are musty, moldy or funky. Think wet cardboard or the smell of a dog’s wet fur. These odors always persist, although your nose can become accustomed to them. A corked wine will also often be darker than normal. The flavors will taste kind of deflated – not clean and fruity, but oily and unpleasant.
The only way to avoid cork taint altogether is to avoid corks. Most high-quality wines are still sealed with a cork, not just out of reverence for tradition, but because many collectors feel that corks enhance the aging process. But in recent years, to eliminate corked wines, some producers have given up on natural corks and moved toward more failsafe types of closures. These include screwcaps, which have become popular in Australia and southern France, as well as synthetic corks, wines packaged in boxes and even wine topped with bottlecaps. The important thing to remember is that non-natural cork closures are no longer a sign of a cheap wine; rather, they’re an attempt on the part of producers to ensure that they can offer consumers a flaw-free product.
How often is a cork-sealed wine flawed? Several years ago, you could assume that one out of every 24 bottles or so would be corked. That statistic has improved somewhat, as many winemakers have started to address some of the underlying issues that lead to TCA problems. Nonetheless, corked wine still shows up, my own experience says in about one out of every 50 or so bottles.
Sometimes, a wine may seem corked, only to improve after it’s been opened for a while, or decanted. This is due to the presence of sulfides in wine. Winemakers use these compounds to stabilize their wines before bottling them. As a result, an eggy or cheesy aroma will occasionally be present, especially in wines like champagne. This isn’t the same as being corked. Usually, there is nothing wrong with the wine; the sulfurous aroma just needs to “blow off,” and then the wine will be fine. And unlike corked wines, wines with this problem usually taste okay.
A wine can be unafflicted with cork taint and still taste bad. This is increasingly rare, but there continue to be winemakers out there who aren’t as professional or fastidious as they could be about everything, from managing their vineyards to hosing down their wineries on a regular basis. Flaws that can creep into these wines range from poor fruit quality to excessive acidity to overwhelming oakiness.
Wines can also be flawed because of the way in which they are stored. Wine is pretty hardy stuff, but it’s sensitive to light, heat and motion. This is why the best place to store your wine is where it’s cool and dark and there’s not a lot of shaking going on. Temperature fluctuation is the worst thing to inflict on a wine. If a wine endures extremes of heat, it can become “cooked.” The flavors will become stew-like, or the fruit will taste un-fresh. Grapes become boiled prunes or taste “raisiny.” That sort of thing. Conversely, a wine that’s been “frozen” can wind up tasting diluted.
If you collect wine and “lay it down” for extended periods of time, you need to accept that flaws may appear simply because most wines don’t age well. Really old wines can become almost like vinegar, completely undrinkable. But even wines that are aged for just a few years can have their normally bright fruit flavors disappear, replaced by acidity, tannin and other unhappy tastes. It’s a risk that wine collectors run, as even expensive, allegedly collectible wines that should last for decades can disappoint. The only sure bet is vintage port, which is made from wine that’s “fortified” with an alcoholic spirit. The high alcohol level acts as a preservative, so vintage ports are usually impervious to any sort of degradation. They were invented to be this way – to survive long sea voyages from Portugal to England.
So in the end, if your wine smells or tastes bad, it probably isn’t you. Almost all wine nowadays should taste delicious – or at least be free of obvious flaws. If there’s something wrong, either send it back or dump it down the drain. Nothing in life is perfect, and wine is no exception.
