Is corked wine such a big problem?
(Introducing: Wine Surveys)
Wine Surveys logo.
Depending who you ask, the incidence of TCA tainted wines is somewhere in the 3% to 10% range.
Remy Charest started a discussion at OWC to explore this very topic. Several members brought some opinionated perspectives to the table and at one point, wine maker Nathan R. Carlson proposed that we conduct an on-going poll or survey to get a real-world sense of the incidence of TCA taint.
Serendipitously, I had created Wine Surveys just a few days earlier, intending it index wine-related surveys.
A simple blog will introduce new surveys, chronicle the progress of others and announce the closing of surveys and polls which have run their course. A Survey Index will list and link to all surveys submitted to the site.
But getting back to the TCA issue….
The TCA survey collects information on wines tainted with TCA. Everyone is encouraged to return frequently and add data. You can do this with whatever frequency you wish, but when you enter data, please count all bottles you have opened since the last time you submitted your data. Obviously, the first time you submit information, your numbers should reflect the wines you have opened since deciding to participate.
Participants do not see the current results. I will periodically give updates of poll results on this blog or on Wine surveys.
Each time you will be asked to enter the following:
- Some identifying information - which will not be shared.
- The number of bottles of wine you opened since last visiting the survey.
- The number of those bottles closed with a whole/complete natural cork.
- The number of those bottles sealed with a natural cork which were definitely corked.
- The number of those bottles sealed with a natural cork which may have been corked, but you are not certain.
We’ll keep this survey going for as long as possible. Please visit the survey here.
If you have a survey you’d like to promote, take a look at Wine Surveys.
Email & Share
August 7th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I think you should get information about the age of the bottles somehow. It might be onerous to ask about every bottle, but some way of relating the statistics to bottle age. Techniques in the cork industry, and winery practices, have changed so much over the years that one person drinking older wines might have very different statistics than someone drinking only new releases, and date would get muddled.
As far as the rate of migration of TCA from the cork to the bottle over time, I haven’t been able to find good data on that, but it might also be a factor if the migration time is not especially short. The best I could find were some documents at: http://www.ablegrape.com/search.jsp?lang=en&query=migration+TCA+cork+wine
August 8th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Arthur,
There has been lots of talk lately about TCA rates declining in the past 5 years as cork manufacturers have better understood the roots of the problem and have developed processes and procedures to minimize cork taint.
Therefore, when our winery recently conducted cork trials, whereby we received ‘random’ bags of 250 corks from a specific lot, and then took 100 of these and soaked them in a ‘neutral’ wine for about 36 hours, we were surprised at the results. The best cork group had noticable TCA rates of about 5% and the worst performing group had rates above 20%! And these numbers do not include corks that led the wine to have either ‘off’ aromas or partial or extremely ‘muted’ aromas . . .
And to relate to Doug’s post above, I recently opened 4 bottles of our upper end pinots at an event a few months ago. These were wines that had been bottled only 2 months earlier, yet 2 out of the 4 bottles had unquestionable TCA defects . . . bummer.
I believe the cork industry still has some way to go to truly ‘eliminate’ these problems in natural cork . . . but along the way, I still am quite concerned about the perception of those wines that are affected out in the marketplace. If a wine is mildly affected, it might simply have a muted aroma and be ’slightly off’ taste-wise - consumers might simply say that they do not like the wine, without ‘knowing why’ and dismiss this wine and/or the producer from future purchases. This would certainly be unfortunate, but I’m sure it happens . . .
I will visit the survey often and see what others have to say. Cheers!
August 8th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
[...] bottles we’ve opened, and how many of them actually had cork taint? Arthur Przebinda, of the Wine sooth blog, among other online things, picked up on the idea and prepared an actual survey that will allow [...]
August 11th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Arthur, I don’t keep track of the specific wines I find to be corked, of the 5000 or so per year I taste. But it seems to be holding steady at around 2%-3%.
August 11th, 2008 at 7:52 am
There are so many problems with doing this, I don’t know where to start. First off, many people just do not know what TCA smells like. I worked in sales for a large cork company until a yr ago. Whenever we would have a winery say they had corked wine, we would take the bottles back and have the actual corks sent to a lab to have them tested. 95% of the time, they were not corked. This is wine from the tasting room that the winemaker themselves said were corked!
In addition, I was at a restaurant and saw a bartenter open 2 bottles of wine and write “corked” on both-I asked to check them out and told him they were cooked, not corked. His response was “yeah, I know. But if I write cooked, not corked, we don’t get our money back”.
Unless there is some form a testing done with an idependant lab, there is no way to know the actual levels.
August 11th, 2008 at 8:44 am
I recently participated as a judge in a tasting where my panel tasted maybe five dozen pinots and ten dozen Cabs. Panel did not see a single corked wine in the wines we tasted. In the last year I have opened at least four hundred bottles of wine for friends and family, old wines, young wines, domestic and foreign, and they were all TCA free. I am reasonably sensitive to TCA, but I do not find it to be as big problem as other winemaking defects like brett, excessive oak, excessive alcohol, or raisined, pruney aromas.
I don’t know why the organizers of these big wine competitions where they taste 2500 wines don’t accumulate “corked” wines and follow up with testing. A small effort and expense for a representative annual survey.
August 12th, 2008 at 6:34 am
I don’t think a sampling of 20 wines is enough to get an accurate assessment. I have a habit of saving corks. I like to read what they say, compare their composition, length etc. I believe the older the wine the higher the incidence of TCA’s. I have heard that the Stelvin closures do not eliminate the TCA’s but rather don’t give them sustenance and allow them to fester. Many winemakers lament about their losses to TCA’s and some have trials in which they bottle both ways and taste later. Surprisingly the winemakers themselves prefer the freshness and pronounced flavors of the Stelvin capped wines when tasted 4-5 years later side by side. I have had only one corked wine in the last 150 or so bottles but very few of those were older than 2000 vintage. Oxidation was more of an issue on the older wines than TCA’s. I am not a collector and drink wines for pleasure and mostly with food. I took a nice Cru Bourgeois Bordeaux to my Mother in Law’s for dinner and was chagrined that is was corked and that I didn’t have a backup in tow. That taught me a lesson…..
August 13th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Bernie: TCA is a chemical compound - Stelvin does not contribute TCA, however bad natural corks can. TCA doesn’t fester once bottled - it is released by the corks into the wine - it is chemical, not biological. Perhaps your experience with older wines more likely to be corked is a reflection of improved quality control by cork companies and wineries?
Morton: That would be a great idea - take a 100ml or so from each supposedly ‘corked’ wine in a competition and run it through GC/MS analysis for halogenated anisoles. Would cost a few thousand bucks, but you’d get an idea of what the rate really was - or have a researcher do this?
Jill: You are right, there are problems. But not everyone understands statistics, and not everyone can recognize TCA accurately, or at the same level. At the same time, it does exist, and it is a problem. The best thing we can do is to have good QC for production and purchasing, good education for customers, and good understanding of alternatives. Not everyone is running around with a GC in their pocket to run analysis, so it is hard to nail down what the problem is sometimes. Sounds like corks have become a favorite scapegoat? How can cork as a brand overcome that, except through redoubling their efforts as consistency and reliability, and participating in educating their clients and wine consumers at large?
The bottom line is that if people think that it is the cork, or if they can blame something on the cork, it will result in lost sales or returns for the cork company’s winery customers. With so many other options, eventually the wineries will get tired of the cork and try one of the other options!
Actually, my outside sales guy took back a wine from a restaurant and said that they told him it was corked. He replaced it, and brought it back to me - it was a screwcapped wine! It didn’t have TCA, it was light-struck, because they had it in a window display and pulled it out when they sold through the rest of their stock.
When we are doing soaks for purchasing (50-100 individual soaks, depending on the lot size) we find about 1-3% definitely TCA positive via sensory, and another 5-10 that we are not sure of, but which definitely have negative off-aromas. We combine and send in the soak wine from these 10 or so, and it almost always comes back with low level TCA as well. (We track all these as we evaluate lots, one day I will compile them.)
Steve - 2-3% do you keep track, or is that just your rough, but informed guess? As someone deeply steeped in the consumer end of the wine business, is that acceptable? What is an acceptable failure rate? Thanks!
September 26th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
[...] a month ago, I wrote about a small experiment aimed to determine the incidence of TCA taint in a real-world setting. I created a survey on FreeOnlineSurveys.com to gather data from volunteer contributors. The aim of [...]
September 26th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I have summarized the survey data here: http://www.redwinebuzz.com/winesooth/2008/09/26/incidence-of-tca-taint/