Another Problem With Cork

[Innkeeper]

Certainly almost all of us experience an uneasy squirming in our guts knowing that we are consumers, writers, producers, marketers, etc in an industry that has a defect rate of between 5 & 10% because of a defect in the closure. This defect is a, hard to detect in manufacture, substance called trichloroanisole or TCA. This gives wine anything from a mild to a wine destroying aroma that resembles wet newspapers.

Now another probem has surfaced called "random oxidation" or "random-ox." Such personages as Jancis Robinson, Australia's James Halliday, and our own Dan Berger have recently written about it. Little is known about the chemistry of this defect, but apparantly in a completely random manner too much oxygen gets through the cork. Remember that the adventage of the cork closure is that it lets a "little" oxygen into the bottle as the wine ages.

Random-ox dulls the wine, and leaves you thinking that the bottle is "bad" or that the wine is "bad." It is probably one of the leading causes of bottle variation. Dan flatly states that the only way he can positively indentify it is when he is tasting with a wine maker, and the wine maker says "Let me open another bottle." In these cases he says he can taste the difference and it isn't due to TCA.

Up to 5% of wine could be so affected. Add this to the percentage of wine affected with TCA, and you could be talking about 1.5 bottles out of every case. Seems to me to be another case for a better closure.