My Wine Smells Like Old, Wet Newspapers – It’s Probably Corked

Have you ever opened a bottle of wine, anticipating the wonderful aromas of berries, lavender, rose petals, or perhaps leather, tobacco, spice, or even (gasp!) grapes, but after you poured some of the gorgeous juice into a glass, took a deep inhale, it smelled like old, moldy newspaper? Or perhaps it smelled a bit like a wet dog. YUCK! The word that comes to my mind is funky. No, not funky like the cool bellbottomed pants you had in high school in the 70s, or a good brass band playing funky music. Funky in this case, is bad, unpleasant, just plain icky, to use a technical term. And then you tasted the wine you had so highly anticipated and it tasted weird. Most of the good flavors and aromas are masked by these other icky (forgive me for using that technical term again) aromas and flavors.

Well, my wine friends your wine is probably corked - also known as cork taint or TCA. The technical term (I’m not kidding this time) is 2,4,6 Trichloroanisole (TCA). What exactly happens when a wine becomes corked? I’m glad you asked. Once immersed in wine, fungal spores in the lenticels of natural wine corks attack chlorine compounds that were used to bleach the cork tree bark for cosmetic purposes. Do you detect a bit of irony here? The very thing that we humans are trying to achieve by making the corks prettier and more appealing can, and does (about 5% of all wine becomes corked from natural cork closures) completely ruin the purpose of putting a cork in a bottle of wine in the first place! AUGH! I hate it when nature fracks with us! There are many other things that can and do go wrong inside a bottle of wine, which I’ll save for a future Wine Muse post, but this is a fairly common and disappointing occurrence.

Why did I decide to write about cork taint, or TCA, today? Because the disappointment of cork taint hit close to home a couple of nights ago. I was at my favorite wine God’s house and we were sitting on his couch chatting, enjoying the view of the Space Needle and Puget Sound when he told me to pick out a bottle of something from his wine cooler. Um...me? I get to pick something out of the wine God’s personal wine stash? He said, yes, with the caveat that not everything in his personal wine stash could be opened, depending on the value. Oh. My. God. Anyway…I gingerly peeked at all of the bottles in his stash and I (we) finally decided on a 1991 California Napa Valley Cabernet. Sorry, but I don’t remember the winery name. We let it sit out and warm up a bit because it had been in the wine God’s cooler. The anticipation was killing me. After giving the wine enough time to come down to room temperature, he opened the wine. I don’t often get a chance to drink a wine this old. Not that 1991 is ancient, but come on! How many of you out there have had the opportunity to drink a bottle of a 1991 Napa Valley Cab recently? Not very many. That’s what I thought.

After finally opening the bottle, pouring the dark, beautiful juice into our glasses, I took my first deep inhale expecting wonderful aromas to go straight to my brain and queue the trumpets and the sweet, pure voices of virgins would sing in the background. Instead, I was greeted with a smell that made me recoil. This wine smells funky, I said to the wine God. It smells like, I don’t know, kind of bad. Like a wet dog. I took a sip. Oy vey! It tasted just like it smelled. Bad. Funky. Icky. If this is what wet dog tastes like, remind me to never lick a wet dog. I felt disappointed. I looked at my favorite wine God and asked him if he was getting the same bad smells and taste as I was getting. He said it probably just needed to open up a bit. I smelled it again. I tasted it again. Yuck. I really, really wanted to love this wine. This was an $80 bottle of Cabernet bottled in 1991 from the Napa Valley. This wine was created to be loved and savored and cherished, even revered. The wine God was not ready to accept the fate of his special bottle of wine. I felt terrible for him. I felt terrible for both of us. He still wanted the bottle of precious wine to be drinkable. I was with him. I asked him if he really thought the wine was okay or if he was in denial. He finally admitted that yes, he was in denial. The wine was suffering from the heartbreak of cork taint. Sad. Completely undrinkable. Not that it would have made us sick. It wouldn’t. But who wants to smell and drink a bottle of corked wine?

The evening of wine drinking was not a total loss, though. After a brief moment of grieving for the highly anticipated Cabernet, we opened another bottle of wine from his personal stash, a French wine that was a Rhone blend of Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvedre. It was really delicious. You can’t keep a wine God and wine Goddess down for long.