The Auswine Forum

All,

You may have seen my recent post on the Gotham Shiraz, most of the bottles in that case reaked of metallic sulphur - totally overwhelming the fruit and spice. Well I now have a case of another wine with the same problem. Getting a little bit annoyed at forking out $250 a case for wine that's undrinkable. Both wines were under stelvin. Smithy points out that there should be less sulphur dioxide under stelvin, so not sure if there is a connection (with stelvin, or SO2 for that matter). However, I have never encountered this taste under cork. Sure you get the odd bottle with cork taint, but I'm finding whole cases screwed by this horrid fault. I can taste it now sitting here writing this - have you ever cut your finger and stuck it in your mouth? Same taste - sulphur/metallic, smelling a little like a lit match.

One or two bottles have come good the next day ( although some of the stink remains). Others haven't improved.

Some people raved about the Gotham, so I assumed maybe a batch problem. However the supplier tells me that all of the wine was bottled and gased on a single occasion. This latest wine has received a good review by TORB (although Ric, you did mention a little "stink which blew off"). So I have no idea what is going on. The chances of getting two cases of faulty wine in quick succession, from different vineyards and suppliers, would seem remote unless there is a problem with an awful lot of winemaking out there.

I haven't mentioned the other wine as I am yet to have a chat with the supplier.

Regards

Frustrated
(bigkid)

I think we are going to see more of this sort of thing.

Its a pretty good description of what I see as the charachter of bigger reds bottled under screwcap. Maybe people are more or less sensitive to this sort of bottle stink.
Personally I think I'm very hard on this particular fault.

I know theres lots of arguments on how the wine has got to be prepared differently prior to bottling....I'd also argue that it allows whole new styles to be explored.

However, for a lot of what we already enjoy, (big oaky tannic lots of fruit colour etc) I don't think the screw is the go. I think theres going to be a lot of people who've made the wrong decision on their closure for their style.

At least we did the trial and came to the conclusion that for us, cork is the go. (Even if it does cost us 4 times a screwcap price)

Theres some talk we will see a TCA removed natural cork inside 18 months.

Fingers very crossed!

Cheers
Smithy

I've heard that TCA free cork story too many times from the industry to believe it untile I see (smell and taste) it.

Matthew

Right this very moment, I'm very tolerant of the odd bottle of cork tainted wine - at least the whole case is unlikely to be undrinkable. I'm very worried about the stack of Cullen Diana Madeleine and Moss Wood Cab Sav I have all under stelvin! I'm gonna be really pee'd off if any of it is SO2'd to death. I'll take it back to WA myself.

Regards,

Allan

MatthewW wrote:I've heard that TCA free cork story too many times from the industry to believe it untile I see (smell and taste) it.

Matthew

Without meaning to hijack the thread, I came across a new conglomerate cork at a tasting several months ago already being used by big names like Clearview Estate over here. It's being developed by someone in Europe, and basically involves super cooling (100K?) to remove carbon dioxide. Not sure about the technical details, but the logic was sound at the time. Here's the blurb from Clearview:

PROGRESSIVE CLOSURES
You may have noticed on some of our wines that we have started using screw caps as an alternative closure to cork. We are using the screw cap on all of our Estate range plus the Reserve Sauvignon Blanc as we believe that these wines will perform better with this type of closure. For our Reserve range we are continuing to use cork, but have sourced a different kind of cork. We are using Diam composite corks which have been specially treated with super critical CO2 in order to remove all traces of TCA which causes cork taint. This is very new technology and we are very excited to be among the first in the world to adopt this new closure. There are two reasons why we are continuing with corks on our Reserve wines: one is for all you traditionalists who enjoy the experience of popping the cork! But more importantly, so that we have no variation in quality, and we can also stipulate the amount of air permeability we require for the extended ageing of our wines.

Cheers,

I gave a couple of bottles a good jolt this morning, they had serious case of gas, fizzed up a treat. They have since been decanted. About 7 hours later the metallic character is detectable on the nose but less so on the palatte. I may even be able to detect some fruit. See what it is like at dinner.

Allan