Mondavi's Woodbridge Wines

[Kcwhippet]

The reason for the screw cap rather than a cork has to do with wine producers and consumers concerns over something called TCA, which is shorthand for 2,4,6 trichloroanisole. Cork producers have long used hyperchlorite, a form of chlorine, to sterilize their corks after they're stamped out. Unfortunately, the chlorine can react with a microscopic fungi and will produce TCA. The problem is that TCA can be detected by humans at a level of about 5 parts per trillion, so if any is present the wine will definitely be perceived as bad. The presence of TCA has been described many ways - wet cardboard aromas and taste, like licking a sweaty horse, moldy, musty, etc. At the very least, the wine will suffer from a definite lack of pleasant aromas and fruity tastes. There's more, but that's it in a nutshell. Since there's no cork to be tainted with a screw cap, many wineries are bottling their wines thusly, even some of the high end wines. When you consider 5% to 8% of corks can have TCA taint, that's an awful lot of wine going bad. Consider a large winery that makes 10 million cases of cork sealed wine a year. They could be selling 500,000 to 800,000 cases of wine with TCA - every year. That's as much as 9,600,000 bottles from that one large winery. Unfortunately most wine drinkers aren't aware of this, and they think they just don't like that particular wine because of the bad taste. As a result, they may never try what's probably a very good wine just because they got one with a TCA infected cork.