My friend Coke Roth had a right to be upset. In a few days' span, he had opened four spectacular wines from four of the Northwest's best wineries.
Well, they would have been spectacular if they hadn't been corked. Instead of pouring more than $200 in great wine down his throat, Coke wistfully poured them down the drain.
A wine is "corked" when it is tainted by TCA (2,4,6-trichloro anisole), the result of a compound that can occur when chlorine comes into contact with wood products, including cork tree bark. Chlorine is used to bleach cork bark. TCA also can occur in barrels and other wood products, though corks get most of the blame.
TCA can make a wine smell musty, like wet cardboard. If a wine has TCA, there's nothing left to do but stand over the sink, turn the bottle upside down and swear under your breath.
TCA taints a lot of wine. Too much. Some say 1 to 2 percent of wines are corked. Others who are more sensitive to TCA say up to 40 percent of wines may be tainted. Our tastings for Wine Press Northwest have shown about 7 to 10 percent.
For Thanksgiving, I served a 1994 Leonetti cab. It was a special wine to enjoy with family. Instead of looking forward to the opportunity to share a great wine, I worried for weeks that it might be corked. Thankfully, it wasn't, but if it had been, it certainly wouldn't have been Leonetti owner/winemaker Gary Figgins' fault. He grows and buys great grapes, buys expensive oak barrels and crafts the wine into one of the world's greatest. But all his efforts come down to relying on a 50-cent cork, a product that has been used as a wine bottle stopper since at least the 17th century. It's viewed as a nearly perfect closure because it is a natural product — the bark of a tree generally found in Portugal — that keeps in wine, keeps out air and compresses to fit into the neck of a bottle then expands to make a tight seal.
Eliminating corked wine is as simple as it is complex. The simple answer is the wine industry must find a bottle closure that isn't tainted by TCA. The complex answer is finding that perfect closure and gaining general acceptance.
Coke and I went in search of the answer and spoke at length with Mark Bassel, vice president of APM, a Montreal company that sells natural corks, synthetic corks, screw caps, crown caps, bottles, capsules and anything else that surrounds wine.
First, we looked at natural corks. Though washing techniques have gotten better, Mark said, the problem of TCA remains. Some companies have experimented with microwaving corks to try to kill any hidden molds, but Mark said there is an issue with maintaining moisture in cork to keep its flexibility and expandability.
We then looked at synthetic corks, such as Supreme Corq made in the Northwest. APM sells a similar product, and Mark sees an advantage to synthetics because they do what a natural cork does: keep wine in and air out. He thinks synthetics' greatest use is in young, fruity wines that will be consumed in less than three years. He said tiny bubbles within synthetic corks can implode, and the cork can begin to shrink. Others don't share this concern, but synthetic corks haven't been around for enough years for extensive long-term tests.
Crown caps, which are used to hold in beer, aren't an option, Bassel said, because they aren't dependable.
Which brings us to a fourth — and many think best — solution for keeping wine away from air: screw caps, known in the industry as stelcaps.
"They're the perfect closure," Mark told us.
Others would agree. Stelcaps keep wine secure and free of TCA resulting from corks, and they are inexpensive. Their major disadvantages include the proper machinery to install them and public acceptance.
Mark says the device to install stelcaps is neither big nor expensive and can be put into wineries' current bottling line operations. They are precise, sophisticated machines. A smaller winery that makes only a few thousand cases of wine annually probably wouldn't want to dive into stelcaps until there is industry acceptance, Mark said. But larger operations could quickly put them into use, save money and be absolutely, 100 percent sure they aren't sending out a single cork-tainted wine.
I'm not so sure public acceptance is a problem, either. Industry leaders and wine media think a stelcap will drum up images of cheap wine. I disagree. I don't think the public cares about what's on top of a bottle as much as what's in it. Corks are a barrier between new wine drinkers and wine because they're difficult to pull out. Using a stelcap makes the wine accessible.
A winery the size of Chateau Ste. Michelle or Hogue Cellars will have to make the first move. Once they use stelcaps and lead the way for others, we'll all begin to stop screwing around with TCA.
Print
E-Mail
