Re-Post of old Cork issue article

Tags

Corked wines, TCA, Wine, Wine Flaws

Bit about corked wines…

I just read the blog post on Michael Bravermann’s site Hamptons Rich & Pour about a dinner I attended last night. No need for me to re-address the evening as he has covered it nicely. But I would like to address the Dessert wine from the dinner and it’s problem.

The said wine is a little Tannat from Vinedo de los Vientos in Urguay. The wine is a late harvest Tannat called Alcyone. I immediately noted that the first wine was corked and whispered this to Kelly, the Sommelier (as I am the consulting Wine Director, I wanted the corkiness to be discovered by someone else). The wine was quickly dismissed by most at the table as crap (before it was announced un-fit). Then Louisa Hargrave smelled the wine and publicly noted it as corked. Kelly got a second wine and poured that around, I noted a nuance that bothered me so I thought it might be the glassware and rinsed my glass. The wine was not as obviously corked but still not right and with a hint of a ‘corked’ note. After that wine was dismissed as well we gave up.

After everyone dispersed, Kelly and I tasted a third bottle that had been opened and was being used for a by-the-glass pour. The wine was spot on, perfect. It was the type of wine that I can just smell and be satisfied. Notes of mocha, chocolate and fresh raspberries, once I did taste the wine all the acidity and balance that was lacking in the other wines was there in spades adn it was obvious that the wine would be perfect to pair with the dessert of Toffee Date Cake with Maple Walnut Ice Cream.

Unfortunately for the little dessert Tannat, Kelly and I conferred and decided to replace the wine for the James Beard Dinner with Patrick Bottex La Cueille Bugey Cerdon Rosé, a sparkling wine from the Bugey area near the Savoie area south of Geneva. The wine is a blend of Gamay and Poulsard (local grape of the area).

So now a bit on the concept of a so-called corked wine. I may eventually make this a separate posting but for now:

Chlorine is used to sanitize many things in our world and it is used in solution to sanitize cork for use in food products. So here we go with a bunch of chemistry…

Chlorine reacts with phenols ( a natural component of oak bark to produce 2,4,6 trichlorophenol (or TCP). TCP is then metabolized by molds growing on the bark to produce 2,4,6, tricholoranisole, aka TCA. It is kind of odd that the Chlorine and resulting TCP was introduced to kill the molds in cork for use in preserving wine and those molds help to create the evil TCA or the ‘cork’ in a so-called corked wine.

There are also Pentachlorophenols found in insecticides and wood preservatives that metabolized by mold to the dreaded TCA. Wood preservatives are sprayed on oak trees, wood palates, wood ships and construction wood. This has gotten some wineries in trouble infecting their entire winery with TCA and creating a situation that requires some severe solutions.

If you need to understand what a ‘corked’ wine tastes like, take a piece of cardboard and soak it in a glass of water for awhile…or consider the smell of a damp old cellar.

The major problem with TCA beyond the nasty smell is when that smell is not noticed…either by someone that doesn’t understand this issue in wine or someone with a relatively low threshold for that smell, is that a low amount of TCA contamination will hide a wines aromas and cause the wine to taste dull. It has been studied and researched and scientists have found that as little as 1ppm (part per million) of TCA will cause a wine to ‘loose’ its fruit and character. Yet many people only notice the ‘corked’/TCA smell down to 7ppm! So there is plenty of room for error. What this means is that a lovely wine can taste very boring and dull without tasting corked and therefore this is bad for the producer, sommelier, wine store merchant or anyone else in the chain of that wines trip to being consumed.

The ppm thresholds of TCA seem to be a moving target, I will be doing more research on this in the near future.

Here are a few links about the issue that I have found useful, but as I said, TCA thresholds seem to be a moving target.

Jean Arnold of Hanzell on TCA

Wineanorak

The Wine Institute

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Gaming the system

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Abreu, Enologix, Forman, McCloskey, parker, randall grahm, ratings, reviews, Vineyard, Wine, wine business, Wine Reviews, wine spectator, Winemaking

Am I ever going to catch-up with the system? Do I want to? I started this wine adventure when the winedom was fairly small. There were the big brands like Mondavi Woodbridge, Cavit, Kendall-Jackson and Gallo and the like and “serious” wine and wine buyers & wine professionals were hardly in the same field or industry. This was in the late 1980’s and it remained that way for at least another 5-8 years. Then something happened. I am not sure why or how, but the giant volume wine producers started getting into the boutique part of the wine industry. A part that had generally been left alone.

My research in the last several years (in preparation for a start-up) all point to how small that boutique part of the industry still is. And yet big commercial wine companies have fought hard to put that passionate part of the industry in their stranglehold. As I look at the wine industry today, I still don’t understand why, but the fallout has been severe on the tiny slice of the wine industry that I and many of my colleagues came to love. That slice is equivalent of 10-15% of the total industry. Where do I get these numbers from? There are about 77 million wine buyers in the US of that only about 9 million spend more than $20 a bottle…ever. That plus the recent published research that found 150 wine brands represent 85% of all wine sales in the US. That’s wine brands folks. Gallo probably owns between 10-15 of those themselves, then add in The Wine Group’s, Diageo’s and Constellations of the wine world and you probably can get those 150 brands under a dozen or two of actual wine companies. Find a list of the wine labels owned by the Goliaths here.

Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon was a speaker at the recent wine bloggers conference and his speech (I read it, wasn’t there) hit on if not all the problems in the wine industry then at least most. In the speech he mentions that gaming the system contributed heavily to the changes and downward spiral of “my little slice” of the wine industry. My opinion is that he is referring to the ability of wine companies to use technology and data diving to figure out what the most important wine critics look for in a very highly rated wine. Rumor has it that Caymus analyzed the wines that The Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate rated 90 points and above and determined what  attributes were common and began working to farm, ferment and age their wine in a manner that would result in wines the critics were rating the highest. There is another culprit out there as well, a math genius who figured out how to charge wineries for the results of algorithms done on the two most influential wine critics The Wine Spectaor & The Wine Advocate. Thank you to Leo McCloskey and Enologix for helping game the wine industry and letting all those megabrands take over the charming part of the wine industry. My apologies to Leo, he is a smart wine person with some fine ideas it’s just like anything great. In the right hands it is good, in the wrong ones well…

It is the same as my view of Robert Parker 100 points and Wine Spectators. They did not create the problem of points, the wine marketing and sales teams did. The wine sales part of the industry began flogging the numbers to make numbers (cases). The retailers fell in line and then so did the wine consumers. I even did it for a short-time, I started selling wines on the street in 1994 and for a (short) bit sold on Parker ratings. But when a new vintage of a highly rated wine got a lower rating, I lost my faith. It was confirmed when a friends wine kept getting 88’s, 89’s and 90’s on first Parker rating, then getting higher ratings in Parkers 10 years later issues. After I had “retired” from the street, Ric (Forman) started making wine for his friend (& vineyard manager) David Abreu. David’s wine became a darling of The Advocate (a string of 100’s) while Ric’s own wine continued to wallow in the high 80’s and low 90’s. And I continue to prefer an aged bottle of Forman Cabernet to anything from Abreu with the same age.

Randall Grahm Do’on it right

Tags

Blogging, Bonny Doon, Santa Cruz, Wine, Wine Critics, Wine Regions, Wine Reviews, Winery

Great, but very long blog post on Randall’s site. I found it through two wine news outlets I follow: Wine-searcher and Lewis Perdue. Wine-searcher is new to this but seems to being a good job of it. Maybe doing this will help redeem them in in the eyes of all the luxury wine producers who see their price-points getting crushed and exposed on the search bot. Lewis Perdue is certainly someone to follow, he puts out a list of top wine business stories several times a week.

Please visit his site and blog and call the winery to buy some of his wine. Anyone this passionate about his craft deserves our attention. Also watch the speech here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hEZs9pCUK8

So here are a couple favorite bits from Randalls Rant:

anyone who entered the business – as a retailer, wine writer or wine maker – did not harbor the illusion that the wine business was going to make him or her rich. We did it because it was something that we loved. But some “visionary” individuals and companies perceived the possibility of unlimited sustained growth and began to build wine brands and wine empires.⁵ This, coupled with the consolidation and tumescent growth of a few wine wholesale companies and mega-retailers, has led to a sort of seamless virtual vertical integration of the wine business, with relatively few players controlling essentially the lion’s share of the game – a pretty good mirror of what has happened in the rest of the world economy.

We need to speak up on behalf – this is maybe a little self-serving here, forgive me – of those who are innovating new styles, or preserving something precious: an old style, an old variety, respecting the authority of a great terroir. The reality is that with the consolidation of wholesale and gradual disappearance of fine wine retailers every day, great and maybe just very good producers are losing access to markets. We have to speak up for those wines that don’t have goofy, eye-catching labels, flavor profiles that are not squarely down the Middle of the Road, and will never be floor-stacked in Safeways.⁸