Wine · Terminology

Corked wine

Wine tainted by TCA from a faulty cork — damp cardboard, wet dog, and stripped-out fruit.

A corked wine is one contaminated by TCA — 2,4,6-trichloroanisole — a compound produced when chlorine-based compounds meet fungi in cork bark, or in cellar timber and cardboard. It smells of damp cardboard, wet dog, musty cellar, and it strips a wine of its fruit long before it becomes obvious as a smell of its own.

It has nothing to do with bits of cork floating in the glass. That is a crumbled or badly pulled cork, which is untidy but harmless.

In practice

  • Detectable by many people at a few nanograms per litre — a couple of drops in an Olympic pool.
  • Sensitivity varies hugely between tasters, which is why one person at the table may be certain while another shrugs.
  • Historically affected some 3–5% of cork-sealed bottles; modern cork treatment and screening have cut that sharply.
  • Not harmful — just deeply unpleasant, and irreversible.

Where you'll meet it

  • Any cork-sealed bottle. Screwcap and glass closures are immune, which is a large part of why Australia and New Zealand adopted them wholesale.
  • Restaurant service: this — not "do you like it?" — is what the ritual taste of the first pour is actually for.

Recognising it

The progression, from subtle to obvious:

  1. Muted. The wine simply smells of nothing much; the fruit has been sanded off. This is the hardest and most common case.
  2. Musty. Damp cardboard, old books, a cellar that needs airing.
  3. Overt. Wet dog and mould, unmistakable across the room.

If a bottle smells like this, taste it anyway — the palate confirms the flat, short, fruitless finish. And note that taint does not blow off with air or with decanting; it gets more obvious as the glass warms.

What to do about it

  • In a restaurant: say so plainly. A corked bottle is replaced, no argument needed; the trade expects it.
  • At home: most retailers will refund or replace, especially with the cork.
  • In an exam: identify the fault by name — "cork taint (TCA)" — and do not attempt a quality assessment of a faulty wine beyond noting it is unsound.

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