Globe and Mail wine connoisseur and fellow alcohol snob Beppi Crosariol agrees with me.
He writes:
Some avid wine drinkers know – and too many do not – that cork is highly susceptible to a foul-smelling but otherwise harmless defect commonly known as cork taint. Officially called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, it is not to be confused with those little particles falling into the bottle as you wrestle with a dried-out cork. TCA is a specific chemical fault and it smells, depending on whom you consult, like mouldy cardboard, damp newspapers, sweaty socks or my neighbour's unwashed dog in the rain.
So why use cork? Partially I think it's part of the experience. Searching through the kitchen drawers for a corkscrew and fumbling to stick it through the cork and turn against mounting resistance seems to make the effort of enjoying the wine more pleasurable but only in the way being made to wear a toga and ceremoniously dunked with maple syrup is tantamount to entering high school.
Let's hear it for TCA less wine. I love progress.
1 comment:
You might be interested in one of my favorite wines: Screw Kappa Napa. I saved the label from a bottle to show my students because it featured a fresco from Knossos Palace, but even better than that was the back label. As I stood in the store reading it I almost dropped the bottle. In Greek (I knew it would come in handy one day) it quoted the first lines from the Gospel according to John.
In any event, it's a good tipple, and I'm rapidly becoming less snobby about what keeps the wine in the bottle until I'm ready to drink it.
Stiniasis!
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