What is "dumb phase"?

[Thomas]

TCA taint smells like wet cardboard or used socks. The tainted wine is stripped of all fruit and nuance and tastes mainly like alcohol.

Big BUT! There are levels of TCA taint that, if low enough, some people will not smell even though the wine will have been ruined by the taint.

That's why I said that you describe the taste of a TCA tainted wine but not the smell. You might not have been able to pick up the smell at whatever level it had been tainted.

Having said that, I also know that some TCA tainted wines can be slight smelling at first and then they start to smell worse as they sit in the glass. The wine is still usually flat.

I am pretty sensitive to TCA, but I have had some wines that started out with the faintest hint of it in the nose and then had gotten increasingly worse in the glass.