jamie goode's wine blog: Another corked wine: the lenticels?

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Another corked wine: the lenticels?

Another corked wine tonight (not that I'm getting many these days). I looked at the cork - once again, it had angry looking lenticels. I'm beginning to thing that the lenticels are the source of the problem with corks: where they run across the face of the cork, does this increase the chance of cork taint? Interestingly, this tainted wine had some mustiness, but also some sweek oaky notes (even though this was an unoaked rose).

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4 Comments:

At 6:53 AM, Anonymous Alex Lake said...

This theory sounds too simple! Why not put out a request that people keep a record of corks and see if you can build up some data? I'll start looking at mine.

 
At 6:56 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just spotted this, which suggests lenticels don't contain more TCA then non-lenticels.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120146060/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

 
At 7:38 PM, Blogger Jamie said...

Here's the abstract from the paper that anon mentions:

It's from the AWRI in 1997

Straight wine corks, from a batch with a high proportion of contamination with 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), were dissected into various sections and the TCA content of these fractions was determined. TCA was found to be concentrated in the outside portion of the cork, and also in the older bark. There was no significant difference in TCA content between the lenticel and non-lenticel cork fractions, between the light and dark portions of the growth rings, nor between the ends and centre parts of the corks. The concentration of TCA in the outer part of the corks indicates that the biomethylation step in the formation of TCA in these corks followed the punching stage of production.

 
At 9:14 AM, Anonymous Jayson Bryant said...

Here in New Zealand we are seeing alot more Stelvin/screwcapped bottles being returned than most people would like to think.
Before screwcaps, the cork took all of the blame for faulty wines and now the winemaker has to take some responsibilty for bad wine making practices.
I do believe that there must be a happy medium and that there maybe some correlation between, those aforementioned, lenticels and TCA.
Strangely we have even had people complain of corked wine in a screwcapped bottle, go figure!

 

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