Is Cork Taint Reversable?

[pizzler]

I've had remarkably few wines affected with TCA over the years. But over Christmas I opened a 1995 Flora Springs cab that had a distinctly unpleasant nose...bad enough that the wine was undrinkable. I had other wine that was open and put it aside, forgetting about it. The next evening, I tried the wine and it was excellent. The nose was classic cab, the taste was spot on.

I did a little research and saw that there are filtration systems which attempt to remove the TCA.

I'm uninterested in buying the filtration system given how rare an occurrence this is for me, but it raises the question of whether old fashioned airing can resolve the problem? Or is it possible I didn't have a TCA problem in the first place?

Happy New Year, all!

[pstarr]

There is some evidence that TCA can be absorbed back into the cork after opening.

I can also recall a few, very mildy tca tainted wines, that opened up considerably after breathing so that other characters pushed the taint further into the background, though it was still there if you looked for it.

[Red Bigot]

If the unpleasant character was strongly evident and then went away it almost certainly wasn't TCA, probably some variation of "bottle stink" that oxidised to something non-intrusive. I'm not familiar with the Flora Springs wine and have tried very few older Napa cabs, but some older Australian cabernets can have a strong dusty/oaky character and slight musty aromas on opening that make me think twice about taint, but they usually breathe up Ok when decanted.

I've never seen a strongly or even moderately tainted wine recover by itself, with decanting or with the cork re-inserted. I have seen one wine under screwcap that exhibited characteristics very like TCA that seemed to dissipate with breathing, so probably not TCA.

Some people claim success with using some plastic cling wrap (Polyvinylidene chloride) in a glass of tainted wine, but it hasn't worked too well for me.

[dave vino]

I put this to the chemistry boffins at work and they basically said no.

Now my memory is a bit hazy on the why as I fell asleep standing up after listening to them for about 30secs explaining it...

But it's due to the way it interacts with certain chemicals (components of the wine) you can't extract it without affecting other aspects i.e you can't reverse engineer the wine to remove only the tainted aspects of it.

Similar to how we can't find out the exact recipe of Coca-cola by putting it through a mass/gas spectro etc. (I think)

[brad]

I've seen examples of this phenomenon previously, but none so clear as a bottle of LE Chard one night. Opened, corked - TCA. Inserted 'clean' cork from another bottle into the LE and left overnight. Next evening the LE had lost all signs of TCA. It happened like that - well, as best my memory recalls that is how it happened. Never tried it as an experiment but perhaps should. Not too hard to do.

[Daniel Jess]

I don't believe cork taint can be reversed. But having said that, they never thought they'd find a prevention for Alzheimer's, either.

But at present, I highly doubt it.