 So what does corked wine taste like? I've got a corked bottle, an uncorked bottle, some cardboard. We're going to do a little taste off. That's all coming off. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel. I am your host, Matthew Horkey. Welcome back to the show where we help you drink adventurously so you can expand your palate and expand your mind. And we're going to be expanding minds and expanding my palate with corked wine. So what is corked wine? It's a very misunderstood term. Corked wine is not little pieces of cork in your glass. That happens when the corks roll. They break off, but that's not a corked wine. Corked wine is a wine that's kind of been infected almost with a molecule, 246 trichloroanosol, also known as TCA. That's TCA tank or cork tank. For all of those that were chemistry majors like me, I wonder if that molecule gives you nightmares about organic chemistry one and two. How does this happen? It happens because there's a fungus that sometimes infects a cork tree, the cork bark. And in a cork manufacturer, they usually bleach and sterilize these cork stoppers before they package them and send them out to different producers. And what happens if there's that fungus in the cork and the bleach comes in contact with that, TCA is born, is formed. Everybody has different sensitivities to TCA. I've been at big tastings where some people picked out that a wine was corked and others said, no, it's definitely not corks. You know, when I was first getting into wine, I remember one of my original wine mentors, we were talking about cork, I said, I'd never smelled it before. And he looked at me and said, once you smell it, you'll never forget it. So how often does corked wine actually occur? I've seen figures going anywhere from 10% to 6% to less than 1%. I can tell you this, last year, producers sent me 715 bottles of wine. Of those 715 bottles, six of them were corked. So that's less than 1%. Actually a lot less than I thought. Three of those bottles, over half of them, occurred in a tasting I did in the same day. I was going through and doing some of my tastings with, thank goodness I have this cork and I came across this bottle and it was definitely corked. This is the Tenuta Cavalier Pepe Broncato 2018. This is Fiano Di Avalino from Campania, Italy. I'm so glad that there were two bottles because the second bottle was really, really an excellent bottle of wine. A corked bottle of wine is not the producer's fault. You know, it happens sometimes. That's why many producers around the world are going to screw caps, glass enclosures, plastic or even synthetic corks. So what does corked wine actually taste like? I see a lot of videos, a lot of articles out there, people saying that it tastes like cardboard, it tastes like wet dog and saying all these things but they're not actually tasting the wine in real time or they don't even have cardboard or anything next to them. So we're going to do a taste off here today. I've got my corked bottle, my uncorked bottle, a piece of cardboard. I even prepared and soaked a piece of wet cardboard and I even have an old musty cardboard box right here. So we're going to come, we're going to taste and compare. You see sommeliers and some people when they, once they pull the corks out they smell it. I've heard before that a lot of times that's silly, that's BS but you know what, I usually can pick up the signs of TCA in a cork. So let's compare here. When I open the wine, the aroma definitely started to come out. Let's compare it to the uncorked wine. Comparing the two, the corked bottle definitely has this cardboard wet paper old dirt kind of smell. I don't know about wet dog. The uncorked bottle is definitely more fruity, more explosive. Let's compare the smell of the corked wine to all the different types of cardboard here. Okay, the dry cardboard a little bit, it does smell a little bit like the corked wine. Let's give the other one a smell here. The corked wine doesn't smell like wet cardboard as much as I thought. Let's try the cardboard box. So the wet cardboard and the dry cardboard are closest to the corked wine. Let's do a taste test. You know I used to think of corked wine actually as tasting like or smelling like my grandma's basement. My grandma used to have a kitchen in the basement that's where we'd hang out a little all the time, all the dust, the dirt, a little bit of the mustiness that's what it smelled like. When I do this taste test though, I actually have to say the wine does taste and smell more similar to me tearing open this dry piece of cardboard than the wet cardboard or the cardboard box. I've got an idea. Let me see if this actually works. If I put the cardboard into the good wine and see if that works pretty close. So what do you do if you get a corked bottle of wine, whether you buy it from a shop or a restaurant or in a supermarket, wine specialty shops and restaurants should take back that bottle of wine, give you a refund or replacement. Supermarkets, I don't know if you can be so lucky. So I hope this helped you out. If you really want to experience corked wine, I guess the the closest thing would find a piece of fresh cardboard, tear it open, smell it and give it a little bit of taste. I hope you found this video useful. Stay tuned for a future video. I'm going to do the saran wrap trick and see if that clears out the cork flavor in about this bottle of wine. I will see you at the next episode. Hello. Thanks for watching. Hey, you made it to the end. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Click the bell so you know when new videos are out. 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