Last weekend in Melbourne I tried a Yarra Valley pinot noir at one of the terrific gastropubs. The wine was glorious, tasting of dirt, rhubarb and cherry with smooth tannins, and a superb match with food. I was so enamoured that when I saw it at a bottle shop the following night, I picked it up for another go. It could have been a completely different wine. Flat and featureless, it had no obvious smell or flavour of cork taint, yet something was amiss.
Had this been the first time I tried the wine, I would have assumed it was a dud. How many times does this happen? How many good wines have been written off after a disappointing experience due to some sort of fault or spoilage?
In this case the wine wasn't obviously corked. By "corked" I don't mean there were floating bits of cork in the glass; I'm talking about cork taint, when mould gets into a cork's pores and reacts with the wine. In most cases a corked wine should be immediately obvious: it will have a mouldy smell like a wet hessian sack and will usually overwhelm all other aromas from the wine.
But if the smell is more like old books or a dank, wet cellar it is often confused with "ageing", particularly if you're a bibliophile and love the smell of musty libraries. In its milder form, cork taint will just render the wine "flat" tasting. Even if it mainly affects the smell, this is devastating; aroma contributes around 75 per cent to a wine's taste. Because it isn't obviously a tainted wine you are left thinking the wine was pretty bland, and, unfortunately, you'll probably vow to never buy it again.
Not all wine faults are the result of cork. Other factors can affect the sensitive, ever-changing beverage such as oxidation, which occurs when a wine is spoiled due to exposure to air. Sometimes this is heralded with the aroma of beer-soaked carpet; sometimes it just results in a flat smell and taste as the wine loses its fresh, fruity characters. Not exactly the stuff which dreams are made of.
A little oxygen is actually a good thing for wine: it is essential during winemaking and of course assists a wine during the breathing process which transpires after removing the cork on an older bottle. A little bit of air leaking into the bottle enhances the ageing process, and natural cork allows this. But when too much oxygen somehow gets into a bottle through an imperfect seal it reacts unfavourably with the wine. Think of an exposed slice of apple when left out on the bench - the fruit browns and begins to sour.
There are various other faults which can be transmitted in the winemaking process from winery equipment, oak barrels, sterilisers and even reactions with yeasts, but cork taint and oxidation account for most tainted wines.
How do you know if your wine is affected?
It's not always easy to identify unless you have an identical bottle opened to compare it to. And unfortunately there's no way of detecting spoilage from a bottle's appearance - you have to rely on its smell and taste. But how many examples slip through the radar? Particularly when the taint may not be accompanied by a strong smell, or when your tastebuds are affected by the drink?
If you're able to identify a tainted bottle, airing the wine won't help. In a restaurant or bar you shouldn't have to pay for the wine, and if you've bought it from a bottle shop you should be able to return it. You could buy wines in screw cap enclosures as a preventative measure; they're becoming the norm for Australian wines as more makers realise they keep the flavours fresh, and more drinkers become educated that they aren't a sign of cheap and nasty plonk. (What drinkers will make of crown seal closures, which have just begun to appear on some Australian wines, is another matter.)
Despite the risks of spoilage though, some winemakers are sticking to cork closures. The long-term effects of how the wine will evolve in the bottle (or not) under a screw cap haven't been rigorously tested yet. Many high-end winemakers are still comfortable using premium grade cork which is more reliable and less likely to develop taint. There's also the romantic appeal of tradition associated with cork, and, rightly or wrongly, it's still considered a nice point of difference between new world or mass market interlopers and old world or prestige producers.
When so much time and painstaking effort goes into crafting a wine, it's nothing short of a disaster that so many drinkers are unknowingly consuming a wine which isn't at its best.
If it's true that up to one in 10 wines is spoilt (or simply lost its exuberance), I must be drinking plenty of affected wines without realising it. How about you?
This post originally appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald.
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