Saving corked wines

posted by philip in Snooth, Wine

Friday! Its been a really busy week for us here at SnoothHQ - we added data, comprising over 50,000 wines, from over 10 companies. Much of these contained duplicate information, but we still scour each record looking for additional information to add to the database. Its a process of continual improvement as we flesh out the details for each wine - adding reviews, tasting notes, ratings, food pairings, awards etc.

As the weekend is approaching, I wanted to leave you with a tip: How to rescue a corked wine.

Most wines are still sealed using natural cork (from the Cork Oak tree). The tree bark is harvested (the tree’s recover and are harvested continually for over 100 years) and washed in a chlorine solution. Sometimes a mold called Trichloranisole (TCA) develops and this is what gives the wine the ‘wet cardboard’ smell and taste. There are many other faults that can make a wine taste bad, but only the wet cardboard smell means the wine is technically corked.

OK, so TCA makes the wine bad. Normally, people would just throw the wine away at this point. However, plastic bags (Saran Wrap, Ziplock Bags etc) are made of polyethylene, which absorbs TCA.

So, if you open a bottle and it pongs, before you tip it away, try stuffing a ziplock down the neck of the bottle. Give it 10 minutes and try the wine. It may not fix it 100%, but if you can take the essence of ziplock the TCA should be better.

Have a good weekend!