Corkiness and soft corks

[Randy Caparoso]

"Corked" wine is manifested through the aroma and flavor. Basically, it smells.

Just last night, for instance, I experienced a fairly rare experience of a French Champagne (a Moet & Chandon White Star Extra Dry, to be precise) being corked (rare, since the Champenoise are usually extremely clean and careful, and work with strictly the highest quality cork material). It literally smelled like a dirty, wet dishtowel -- not the usual fresh, wispy, smoky/creamy/yeasty aromatics you get in Champagne. When a wine is like this, it will taste the same on the palate. Flavor, after all, is basically a sensation that you smell; and so if a wine stinks, it will "taste" stinky.

But the thing about this Champagne is that it still actually tasted crisp and smooth on the palate, since the finely balanced sugar/acid components was not affected by the corky problem. So the wine actually finished nice and smooth -- unfortunately, though, like a smooth, dirty dish towel rather than a Champagne. In other words, corkiness basically diminishes the fresh, fruity quality of wine; replacing it with a damp, mildewy or wet cardboardy quality. If the wine you had the other night did not have this, it probably tasted bitter because it simply had too much tannin (which creates a bitter and/or astringent sensation) and not enough balancing fruit for you. It could be because the bottle was exposed to extreme temperature fluctuations and so its natural fruit quality was either burned or oxidized off (if the cork had shrunk and let air into the bottle). But an oxidized or just plain tired tasting wine due to bad storage is not the same as a "corked" wine, which is flawed because of a dirty cork put in by the winery.