I like cork. I mean, screwcaps are sometimes nice, but you can't really beat the cork mystique, if you could call it that. Cork is biodegradable, at least, and we know that in five or ten years our bottles sealed with cork won't have anything screwy (forgive the pun) going on in them, unlike with screwcaps. Screwcaps seem promising but who knows how wine sealed with screwcaps will age?
I don't like TCA. TCA, or trichloroanisole, is what causes that nasty greenish wet basement (we call it "bungalow" around here) or wet cardboard smell that you get in a bottle of wine with cork taint. Cork comes from oak trees (Quercus suber) with very thick bark that grow around Portugal and Spain, and every few years the bark is stripped off and cut into corks (the tree is not killed in the process, and can be harvested again once the bark regrows). Before harvest, it's just tree bark, and bugs crawl around on it and all kinds of exciting biological things go on in and on it. If the right fungi are present (either in the bark when harvested or in the bottling area in the winery), they combine with the chlorine used to sanitize the cork and the closed environment the bottle provides when the wine is bottled and form TCA. The irony here of course being that the process we use to sterilize the corks actually provides fodder for the fungi to make TCA.
So even while half the world is yelling "screwcaps" at the top of its lungs, it's good to know that people are still working on making cork better. There's a new process called Symbios that allows cork producers to cook the corks in an undisclosed solution and eliminate TCA problems. The article there doesn't state how successful the process is, and we won't know that for a while (nor will we know what this chemical the corks are boiled in will do to wine in long-term storage), but it sounds like it will be worth more investigation and trial.
In the "why fix the problem when you can deal with it later" camp, we have the 50-dollar Dream Taste solution, coming straight outta Burgundy with its promise to get the TCA out of your wine through "ionic filtration". That sounds very cheesy and Sharper Image-esque to me, and seems to be limited in its success. The human nose can detect TCA in very very tiny amounts, usually a threshold comparable to being able to taste a sugar cube dissolved in an amount of water equal to a thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools, and that kind of sensitivity is hard to beat with ionic magic. But it still has some promise.
I am more of a fan of "stop it before it happens" solutions as opposed to "do something after it happens" ones so the former makes sense to me more than the latter, but I guess if you have a fancy old bottle of something or other and it is cork-tainted, you definitely want to invest in some Dream Taste.
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