First TCA afflicted wine

[Michael Hann]

I understand that a substantial number of bottles of wine are "corked" -- afflicted with TCA. By substantial I'm thinking on the order of 1:100 bottles or 1:1000 bottles. If this general statistic is wrong, please let me know. I'm relying on my memory of having read this somewhere. I have never had a wine that I noted to be afflicted with TCA. I was concerned that maybe I was lacking in sensitivity to this affliction.

Last night I had my first bottle of wine showing TCA: a 2005 Trimbach reserve Pinot Gris from Alsace. The wine smelled very distinctly of old magazines. When I was a kid -- back in the mid-1960s -- I would spend a fair amount of time in the basement of our farmhouse in the hot summer months where it was cool, reading old issues of Field and Stream magazine and Outdoor Life magazine that my father hoarded up down there. The wine smelled just like those old magazines. What I read on-line confirmed my thought that it was TCA I was experiencing. I've drunk many bottles of wine, but never found a TCA afflicted bottle before. After this experience, I'm pretty sure I would have noticed if I had met up with such a bottle. The bottle's contents went down the drain. I have had others of this specific bottle that were fine. I've got 6 or 8 more bottles of this remaining. I hope they are OK, but I'll cool an alternative Pinot Gris from a different vintage as a back-up when serving with a meal in the future.

Interestingly the cork used was a synthetic cork -- one of those kind of plasticized corks. Thus, the TCA problem surely did not stem from the cork.

[Andy Velebil]

Corked rates can vary and it's possible you've had a corked bottled before this one and just aren't that sensitive to it unless it reaches a high enough threshold. If so, consider yourself lucky. Many of us are very sensitive to it and even a little bit of taint is noticed. I sometimes wish I was like Glenn, with his high threshold for detecting it.

And yes it is possible to have a corked bottle from a non-cork enclosure. If the winery itself is infected that can infect the wine. B.V. here in Cali had a winery wide problem with TCA and was rumored to have caused many vintages of their wines to be infected, albeit at low rate. For some time they took the "we don't care, most people don't notice" stance, but IIRC they have since cleaned up the problem. As you can guess, a winery wide issue isn't exactly cheap to clean up. You have to replace and/or sterilize the whole place, barrels, walls, equipment, etc.