Corked or Cooked or Just Plain Bad?

[Thomas]

Stealthman, you are not going to like this answer: it simply is impossible to give information about what might have been wrong with a wine without having the experience of smelling and tasting it. Your description could be the cork, but then again, it might not, especially if there is no mustiness.

A cooked wine is essentially an oxidized wine. When cooked, the wine will seem like sherry or madeira, hence the term, "madeirized" which means oxidized. The two wines I mention are purposefully oxidized, but this is not a good thing to happen to red table wines.

Remember this: there is no practical evidence that a corky wine is the fault of the winemaker or winery--it can happen to a cheap or an expensive wine because the fault is generally in the cork. As for cooked wine, that can be the fault of poor storage conditions anyway along the distribution pipeline, or a bad cork that causes leakage, or simply bad winemaking practices.