Perhaps the rarest bottles of wine are the ones that are just barely corked, minimally damaged enough that they are still drinkable. Most flaws in wine exist somewhere on a spectrum, some amount being acceptable or even enjoyable to the right palette. Cork taint (TCA – 2,4,6 trichloroanisole if you’re a nerd) is special because it just ruins wine. Full stop. It shuts down all the fruit aromas and flavors and replaces them with the smell of never read romance novels fossilizing on the “free book” shelf outside your town’s cheapest thrift store. While other “flaws” exist in context with the rest of what the wine is doing, expressing, being, dreaming, whatever, cork taint just douses everything with dirty pond water then flicks its cigarette towards the bedraggled mess, somehow lighting it on fire.
Now, you may be thinking, “didn’t you say there are bottles that can be corked but not bad?” Yes, but the reason they’re rarer than a steak that is still mooing is TCA can be perceptible at parts per trillion, so asking “how much is too much?” is a bit like asking how many plutonium paperweights is too many for one office. But chemistry will be chemistry, and despite the absolutely infinitesimal amount of TCA required to turn perfectly good wine into flat kombucha strained through a stack of newspapers with headlines like “Who Is Arch-Duke Ferdinand And Why Is It Everyone’s Problem?”, available reagents will limit how far the spoilage goes. TCA is formed by fungal and bacterial organisms metabolizing 2,4,6-trichlorophenol (TCP), a product of wood lignin reacting with chlorinated compounds. Often a corked wine will barely smell “off” when opened, the microbes inside needing a few minutes to wake up, taste the oxygen, and freak out about the presence of TCP. You might get a whiff of wet dog and think nothing of it and return to the bottle a few minutes later to discover what you mistook for a damp chihuahua is in fact a St. Bernard wearing a stagnant estuary. But, if there’s little enough microbial whatsits in the wine, and a veeeeeerrrryyy tiny amount of TCP, maybe it won’t keep getting worse. Or won’t get worse quickly. On the other hand, sometimes you can smell a corked bottle as soon as it’s opened from across a crowded room full of people wearing cheap cologne and betting on their poker games with car fresheners.
What makes cork taint so uniquely depressing for wine-makers is that it doesn’t reflect anything about how they made the wine. With other “flaws” – brettanomyces, reduction, diacetyl, volatile acidity – there is a narrative embedded, a description of the challenges faced in making the wine, and if it’s a slight enough characteristic the wine might transcend the negative impact and still be great. Meanwhile, wine completely free of any of these, perfectly clean and inoffensive, can be too mediocre to ever bear ever mentioning again. Who’re you gonna remember, Cutler, the rakishly good looking garbage man with a scar on his face and a heart of gold, who rides next to the compactor on the back of the trash truck with the bearing of a pirate midway up the rigging, or Ted from accounting who wore his navy blue dockers instead of his khaki ones on casual Friday? Cork taint is the equivalent of finding out either of those guys died of a carbon monoxide leak.
Cork Taint 