Wine myths
Corked wine means bits of cork in the glass
“The wine is corked — look, there is cork floating in it.”
Cork fragments are an opening accident and are harmless. "Corked" means contaminated by TCA, which smells of damp cardboard and wet dog, and it can happen with no visible cork at all.
The full answer
Cork taint is caused principally by 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, detectable by many people at a few parts per trillion. It presents as damp cardboard, wet newspaper, mouldy cellar, or simply as a wine that seems muted and has lost its fruit.
Pieces of cork in the glass mean the cork crumbled while being extracted. It affects nothing but appearance; fish them out.
The name is misleading in the other direction too. The related compound TBA can originate in the winery rather than in the cork, so a wine sealed under screwcap can in principle show the same character.
The most easily missed presentation is not a smell at all: at low concentrations TCA suppresses fruit aroma rather than adding an obvious off-note, so a mildly affected bottle tastes flat and dull rather than wrong.
A biochemical or physical process that has been demonstrated experimentally and is not seriously contested — the sort of statement that appears in enology textbooks without hedging.
What would settle it: A controlled experiment failing to reproduce the process.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Wine flavours, faults and taints — The Australian Wine Research Institute
- The Australian Wine Research Institute — AWRI