Bloody corks!

[TORB]

I had been having a good run of luck with corks for awhile but the law of averages have just caught up with me! Four out of the last 14 have had cork induced problems, three TCA and one oxidised.

Last night I opened a DP63 Muscat and it was corked and today the bottle opened was oxidised.

Four letter words

[GraemeG]

Ric,
Are your overall statistics still running around 5-6% for TCA-ed wine?

cheers,
Graeme

[simm]

Yeah Ric,

I seem to be running against the law of averages too. I have only had five corked, cooked or oxidised bottles out of my entire wee cellar, and I'm just dreading the day a good bottle cops the odds. Two out of the previous five were the same case and a third from that lot was suspect, showing very mild cork taint through slightly deadened fruit. Just the smell of taint makes me run for the bowl.

Do you think that if you spread your cellar over a greater range instead of quantities of the same wine, that the chances of fouled wines increases or decreases? As I have a small cellar, and therefore very little of it has gone over the 6 bottles per label/vintage, and I always thought that this might be saving me a lot of heartbreak.

Let us all pray to the Big B. (Bigot, not Bacchus - or are they one in the same?)

[Murray]

Two out of the previous five were the same case and a third from that lot was suspect, showing very mild cork taint through slightly deadened fruit. Just the smell of taint makes me run for the bowl.

simm, you ought to go back to the winery on this one. TCA taint is not truly random, and does affect batches of corks. A batch of tainted corks can stay in proximity through the bottling line and then be pack in close proximity. If you've struck two, potentially three, out of a pack then report it to the winery as a suspect batch, particularly including the 'packed date' from the box if you still have it.

Do you think that if you spread your cellar over a greater range instead of quantities of the same wine, that the chances of fouled wines increases or decreases? As I have a small cellar, and therefore very little of it has gone over the 6 bottles per label/vintage, and I always thought that this might be saving me a lot of heartbreak.

No.

The next 6 bottle pack you get may well be TCA free, just any one of the 6 individual bottles selected may be tainted. That's just the nature of the thing.

[jezza]

Torb;

Here's a good one, we opened 20 cases last week (charity event) and there was one corked wine out of the lot. Now this is very unusual for when we have done this sort of thing in the past you can just about gaurantee that one bottle in a case (on average) is corked or otherwise spoiled.
The problem is by the time you get halfway you really start to wonder if you are having a off day and you have missed some corked ones

[simm]

simm, you ought to go back to the winery on this one. TCA taint is not truly random, and does affect batches of corks. A batch of tainted corks can stay in proximity through the bottling line and then be pack in close proximity. If you've struck two, potentially three, out of a pack then report it to the winery as a suspect batch, particularly including the 'packed date' from the box if you still have it.

Did just that Murray. In fact there was quite a long thread about this very topic and the winery, and not only that particular vintage (1998), on the Winepros forum. Ok, you've forced me to name them. The bottles in question were Rymill MC2. Fortunately I had bought them from the Wine Society and they gave me money back without even a second thought - as I recall I sent the wine down the sink and didn't have to front up with the bottles which would have been oxidised by then anyway. The event so affected me that I haven't been able to go back to try another bottle from this winery since.

Which leads me to a TN request from anyone having tried Rymill of late!

Regards,