GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Even the best winemakers’ products are occasionally corked. If you’re uncertain, leave the wine for a few minutes: it might just need to open. But if you suspect it is corked, or you’re sure it is: don’t drink it. Corked wine is likely to provide a headache and an unpleasant drinking and dining experience.
And don’t keep sniffing it to check, because your tolerance level for that corked smell rises with each sniff. Even your dog running in from a swim in the summer pond will smell all right after this!
Don’t panic, either, if you have a wine snob at the table and you’re not sure. Ask his or her advice and if the verdict is “corked!” but you don’t believe it, stopper the bottle and check it out again yourself, later. The smell won’t disappear and you’ll learn from it.
Serve another wine if you have one handy.
In Switzerland, you can get your money back
The good news is that if the wine has been bottled in Switzerland, you can get your money back. Here’s the law covering it:
(art. 197 and following CO 10 June 1988) “Swiss and foreign wines that are bottled in Switzerland will be replaced or reimbursed during one year starting from the delivery date. Foreign wines that are bottled in their country of production will not be reimbursed.”
Be sure to keep the receipt, which shows the date. But most winemakers will take back their own goods without question, as long as it is in the original container. If you drank a glass while you were trying to determine if there is something wrong, don’t worry: the producer will immediately spot the problem, if there is one, or won’t ask, in the interest of good customer relations.
You’ll have to pay for the shipping or the trip to the winery. If this seems like too much hassle, write it off to experience and have one last quick sniff of the wine to register the smell in your memory.
The knowledge of what “corked” smells like is gained the same way we learn all other smells. We learn to recognize and identify them over time, thanks to our memories. This is why wine experts are often found sniffing fruits and vegetables in the supermarket produce section! I have trouble distinguishing rose from pear smells, strange as that might seem, so I routinely smell pears at the store to improve my memory of them. I blame it on a childhood of canned-only pears, which smell more of syrup than the fruit.
Will corked wines hurt you?
No, they are just unpleasant.
Are corked wines a sign of a lower quality?
Not at all: it happens to even the greatest wines. I recently interviewed a wine expert from Sotheby’s following an auction where wines that cost hundreds of Swiss francs were sold and I asked what he would think if he paid such a price and then discovered the wine was corked. “My bad luck!”
Has a corked wine been mishandled during vinification?
No. The presence of TCA or other tainting factors can be due to a number of factors that are often beyond the control of even the most hygienic producers.
Will sniffing the cork tell me if the wine is off?
Sometimes but not necessarily. If a wine is well and truly corked, the cork itself may carry the unpleasant odour, but if the wine is a bit corked, enough to ruin an otherwise good wine, its presence in the cork might be too subtle to detect. Corked wines are more obvious as wines warm up, and in the glass, where the smell opens up.
So should we avoid wines with corks and buy screwcap wines?
That’s a whole different matter, and the debate is long over about whether quality wines can have screwcap tops (the answer is a resounding yes), but many of us sometimes enjoy the ceremonial side to drinking wine, where we unscrew real cork from an elegant bottle. Viva the cork!
More on corked wines:
- wikipedia
- Jancis Robinson on serving a corked wine to one of the world’s top sommeliers
- NY Mag on what to do when served a corked wine in a restaurant
There is an easy way to recover corked wine and return it to full “flavor” with a single pass through a simple filter. We currently sell this product on a commercial basis to wineries but we don’t currently have a convenient way of packaging this product for the consumer market. Idea’s?
G. Heyes
I’d certainly want to check this out before promoting it. Anyone have experience with this? You’ll have to swear you don’t know and have no connection with the manufacturer!
I’ve tried exposing the wine to plastic with some luck (some wines had so much TCA that this trick couldn’t cure). Like rolling a new ziploc sandwich plastic bags inside the bottle and putting the cork back. TCA is known to bind a wide varietry of plastics. Leaving the wine in contact with the plastic overnight, can get rid of the “corked ” character. It’s definitely worth a try before anybody decides to pour the wine down the drain. Of course this advise doesn’t apply to a restaurant setting, but can be tried at home.
I’d still just take the bottle back for a refund.
It is possible that a screwcap wine can be corked. The reason is TCA can be caused by mold and clorine coming into contact. Most empty glass comes in white cardboard boxes and to be white means bleach/clorine was used. If a piece of lint from the box gets into the glass and remains when filled it can become corked. I have had this situation occur a couple of times.
You’re right, and I debated making such a black and white statement because things can go wrong, but I think this is nevertheless a different situation – if you poured the wine from that bottle into another glass you wouldn’t have the problem. I’ve had good wine that tasted somehow wrong and I wondered if it was corked, only to work out that the glasses had been stored upside down on a white tablecloth and the glass itself had a kind of corked smell, which a delicate white wine picks up. A new glass solved the problem.