Corkiness and soft corks

[Tari Di Bello]

Another "wine chick" with something to say. I'm married to a winemaker and cork issues are a major dinner time discusion in this house. So here it goes. First, I want to share with foodie and Randy, some of the difficulties involved with finding decent cork. You cannot look at a cork, smell a cork and tell if it will cause TCA, there is no chemical analysis (on a cork} to tell you if it will either, you can tell other qualities about the cork doing this, but not TCA. The usual way winemakers check a batch, is to soak a bunch of corks in wine or water and see what it smells like (you don't know its there until the wine extracts it), obviously you can only check so many, and every batch is going to have some TCA corks. There is talk of a new test which will sample the air in a bag of corks using a gas chromatograph, sounds great if you can afford one. Also it has never been done yet.
Really great corks now cost now cost $1.30-$1.50 per cork versas $.18-.30 a few years ago.
Nobody chlorinates their corks anymore, have not seen one of those in about 8 years, they use hydrogen peroxide, or the natural cork(mucho dinero). They both can give you TCA.
TCA is caused by mold not bacteria, cork oak bark sits out, stacked in open fields, on dirt, surounded by four hoved bovine units. Many types of mold grow on them, some merchants consider some of these molds to be beneficial. I don't know if they are.
The reason you see little problem with Champagne corks is they only need a small amount of high quality cork glued to the end of the cork and the selection process for this is enviable.
So in closing IT IS GETTING DARNED HARD TO FIND A GOOD CORK. In this house synthetic corks are starting to rule.