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Wine Confident: Identifying flaws in your wine

Flawed wines are more common than you might think and recognising them can be tricky. In this excerpt from Wine Confident, Kelli White explains how to detect imperfections like cork taint and what to do if you come across a flawed bottle. With a little training, you can ensure every wine experience is a good one

Words by Kelli A White

Wine Confident extract
A section of White's new book Wine Confident is dedicated to identifying flaws in wine, including cork taint (Photo: Emma K Creative)

It’s hard enough to sort through the world of wine and determine your preferences without having to contend with flaws. But unfortunately, flawed wines are all too real a concern. There are many things that can go wrong with a bottle of wine and very few are visible from the outside. Detecting them requires a bit of palate training.

This is where professional assistance is essential. If you are at a restaurant and concerned your wine may be flawed, ask a sommelier, manager, waiter or bartender with a working knowledge of wine to taste it. Assuming they can confirm the wine is indeed damaged, most restaurants will exchange it without fuss. When it comes to retail, the best strategy is to bring the bottle back – unfinished – as soon as you can. Your chance of talking a retailer into a refund increases if you can return the wine while still relatively fresh, so that the flaw might be detectable. But do bear in mind that precise policies on this point vary from business to business.

There are many things that can go wrong with a bottle of wine and very few are visible from the outside

It is also important to note that flaws exist on a spectrum. A wine can be very oxidized or lightly oxidized; extremely bretty or barely bretty. Whether it registers as pleasant or unpleasant depends on the preference of the drinker. As an example, I love reduction but am sensitive to volatile acidity (VA). A good friend of mine who also happens to be a Master Sommelier loves VA and also enjoys rancio-style wines (deliberately oxidized). A little tolerance will serve you well as you explore the wide and sometimes wild world of wine.

Wine Confident
Good restaurants will exchange a bottle, regardless of its value, if it has a flaw (Photo: Emma K Creative)

Cork taint

If I were in charge, one of the first things about wine that I would change is the term ‘corked’. It is very misleading. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a guest think that being ‘corked’ just meant that a wine was bottled under cork. And then they’re confused as to why that’s a bad thing. It isn’t. ‘Corked’ is just a short-hand way of a saying a wine has ‘cork taint’ – aka TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) or a related compound.

Wine corks are harvested from the bark of the cork oak tree, which grows most famously in Portugal. TCA forms in the bark and leeches into the wine via its cork, which is why wines bottled under screw cap are effectively safe from this specific taint.

Cork taint can make a wine taste muted or truncate its finish. But its primary characteristic is its funk. There are many ways to describe cork taint’s particular mustiness. Some say wet dog, others rotting geranium, still others say grandma’s basement or wet newspapers. Unfortunately, a few of these descriptors are redolent of aromas commonly found in aged wine, such as ‘library’ or ‘cigar box’. This is why the uninitiated might think a wine is corked when it simply smells a bit old.

TCA gives off a very specific odour that, once properly learned, is hard to mistake for anything else

However you describe it, TCA gives off a very specific odour that, once properly learned, is hard to mistake for anything else. Identifying cork taint is important because if you don’t know how to recognize it and are served a corked bottle, you might just think you don’t like that wine. Which is unfair to the hardworking people who made it.

What’s the best way to familiarize yourself with TCA’s distinctive stink? Ask your favourite wine professional if they have any corked bottles around. If you don’t feel like waiting for the flawed stars to align, however, you can always purchase a Le Nez Du Vin fault kit, which will help you detect any problems.

Cork taint is the exception to my previously espoused ‘spectrum of flaws’ theory. Even a slight whiff of it ruins a wine for me. For years, I believed this was a universal truth among wine professionals until one evening, working the floor in Napa Valley, I opened a bottle that I suspected might be corked but wasn’t quite sure. Because the wine was very rare, and because the guest was a prominent winemaker, I asked for his opinion. He insisted it was sound and proceeded to drink it with gusto. Upon leaving, he admitted that the wine was, in fact, slightly corked. Horrified, I attempted to remove it from the tab, but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘The wine was still so enjoyable,’ he assured me: ‘Like a beautiful painting with a very small tear.’ Though I appreciated his aesthetic flexibility, I had to respectfully disagree. To my palate, cork taint, even in small amounts, is a wine killer.

 

Pro tip: Tips for detecting cork taint

  1. Go with your gut instinct. Have you ever smelled a wine, thought it was corked, only to go in for a deeper sniff and start second-guessing yourself? This isn’t cork taint being sneaky, this is your brain messing with you. In some senses, that first sniff of wine is the most potent. As the brain gets used to what’s in front of it, it begins shuttling scents to the background. This is not unlike how your house smells virtually odourless to you but has a definite scent to visitors. In tracking my own experiences, anytime I instinctively thought a wine was corked, I was usually right.
  2. When in doubt, decant. My entire sommelier career was spent at restaurants dedicated to older vintages. Every so often a bottle would display musty notes upon opening that were worryingly similar to cork taint. The fastest way to find out whether a wine was corked or just musty was to decant it. Funk blows off, cork taint only gets worse with air.

 

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