Anyone here who drinks wine would know that something like 5% of bottles under cork are tainted with 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA) which gives the wine a mouldy taste. I am very sensitive to this – and to most other mould smells and tastes. They say that a higher percentage of bottles affected by low levels of TCA are “flattened” with much of the wine aroma and flavour gone. I can’t say that I can pick this.
Following a very bad batch of corked wine, the Clare producers, lead by Jeffrey Grosset, adopted screw caps firstly for their riesling then for most of their products. And screw caps have spread pretty widely around the Australian wine industry. CSIRO work (sorry, can’t find a link) suggests that even aged reds are not effected by use of screw tops, except insofar a TCA is avoided.
The French wine industry by and large is staying with cork though a sommelier in a Paris restaurant told me that the 5% figure matched his experience. He said that he made sure bad bottles never reached the table.
Now, a case study: you are managing a cork producer. About 5% of your production is tainted and will cause serious damage to the wine it seals. What do you do? A lot of R&D and quality control to remove the problem?
No of course not. You would run a PR campaign with the help of WWF and other Green groups saying that the Iberian lynx and other wonderful animals and plants will be destroyed if we continue to selfishly demand wine that does not smell like an old damp, second hand bookshop.
