I’m continuing to dive into studies examining the frequency of cork taint and the pros and cons of various wine closures. In the meantime...

New App Sniffs Out Cork

\The Cork Quality Council and ReCork are releasing a smartphone app. According to their press release, it “allows users to search a database of more than 1,700 wines that identifies which ones are sealed with natural cork.” 1,700 isn't a very big number and I found searches by winery name to be frustrating. You'll have better luck choosing a winery from the pop-down menu.

In a tweet related to the announcement of this app, Joe Roberts aka @1WineDude suggested he’d rather have an app that could detect TCA in unopened bottles. Yes, please!

The Danger of Open Web Surveys

In a discussion within the Wine Bloggers, Lovers & Enthusiasts Group at LinkedIn, Richard Beaudin referred to an online survey he conducted. It was a simple survey, a question really, posed at the end of his article on closures, TCA, etc. He asked whether people thought the type of closure was an indicator of wine quality. And now I quote Richard, “In less than 4 days I had over 400 responses with 99% pointing to natural cork as indicating wine quality. I thought that a bit odd so checked my site stats and found that I had several hundred visits from readers in Portugal. Not surprising that the survey results were tilted in favor of natural cork.”

TCA, You Little Devil

Some scoffed at my suggestion that TCA rates in wines sealed with cork may be as high as 8%. They think I'm nuts. I may be nuts, but I based that number, which was th high end of a range I provided, on my personal experience. To validate that, I’ve begun tracking every single wine I open. I list their condition and closure type. I am not counting wines that I experience in tasting rooms and other situations where the bottles were opened, and presumably screened for condition, outside of my view.

I’ve opened 32 bottles in the past 15 days. [I know. I need to step it up.] Among those bottles were three Calera Central Coast Pinot Noir with glass stoppers. The wines were perfectly sound, but I cut the dickens out of my thumb on one of the uber-thick metal capsules. Note to Calera: Ow! Please find less lethal capsules.

Another three bottles were sealed with screwtops. All three wines were sound. There was no TCA, no oxidation, no reduction, no this and no that.

The 26 remaining bottles were sealed with cork of one sort or another. Nine bottles were sparkling wines, each fine. The others were still wines and two of those were (massively) afflicted with TCA. Those two were sealed with regular, natural cork. They came from two different wineries and two different vintages.

So, of 26 bottles sealed with cork, two were “ corked.” So, what percentage is that... Hmmm. 8%. That’s a total coincidence. But, wow, isn’t that a coincidence? I’ll be the first to admit — here I am, admitting it — this finding is totally anecdotal and not useful statistically with such a small sample size. It was, however, a totally genuine experience and begins to provide some validation for my perception of TCA rates. I’ll continue to track my own experiences. We’ll see if and how my percentage changes when I have a much larger sample size.

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