Man am I getting tired of corked wine. I am ESPECIALLY tired of $50 wine that’s corked.
Last summer I visited Columbia Crest and discovered they test all cork deliveries with spectrometers refusing any that are tainted. This should be the industry standard. At the very least you need to send a random sampling of bottled wines to a lab checking for contaminants.
I know of a winery that lost half a bottling run to TCA taint: the cause was the paper filter in the bottling line; the contamination likely happened in a warehouse or a shipboard container. In short, aside from instructing staff to smell all paper and wood products, there is no way other firms’ QC programs will catch it.
If you’re going to sell a $50 consumer product you need to pay attention. There are too many good wineries for me to bother retesting wines where the maker cannot bother implementing quality control.
But – if no wineries use corks, what is my six-year old going to use for his magic trick? You just can’t stick a pin in those plastic lids.