I belong to co-operative tasting groups (groups that gather to try wines, usually blind, sharing the expense and duties) [1,2]. At a recent tasting of nine 2002 Nuits St. Georges, three wines were TCA-contaminated ("corked"). Most or all of the 11 tasters noticed the three, and remarked in their blind tasting notes before we discussed the wines. The contaminated wines varied in degree and nuances, but still, 33% is a record in my experience. (A small sample, of course. Contrary to Cervantes, by a small sample we may not judge the whole of these wines.)
After the blind tasting, as the host passed plates of cheeses and other foods, one cheese was named phonetically as "pavie." I asked if this name implied that it was a cheese long enjoyed by people who knew cheeses of that part of the world, then suddenly in demand among people who had never mentioned it until new ownership, and a perfect "score" from one taster who favors numbers, and its price increasing 10 times? No, I was told. But also, asserted some who've tried the New Pavie (the wine), that product seems to them weird, and it was unclear to these people of experience just how that wine would age. (This is not the preoccupation, evidently, of its new devotees.) So that factor too must be included among the signs of the full Pavie Syndrome.
Your health -- Max
[1] By the way -- to anyone not in them already! -- regular tasting groups are an excellent economical way for anyone to try new wines as they come on the market; to share information, learn about wines, spot good ones independent of reliance on newsletter tasters who cause thousands to seek the identical wine and drive up its price; etc. Such tasting groups are many in the region where I live, and they have a long history. [2] Of the co-operative tasting groups I attend now, the first began in Berkeley, California in the 1970s and I joined in January 1982. Soon after, on 27 Feb 1982, Charles Wetherell posted a charter message for net.wines, which became rec.food.drink in late 1986. For years after that, there was a plan and consensus to spin off, with sufficient traffic, rec.food.drink.wine. However, not everyone knew this, newbies least of all, and some of the people who did know it were not reading at the particular moment when, in 1994, amid impatience and a fad for creating "alt" newsgroups at whim, the spin-off became instead this newsgroup, alt.food.wine.(Please: Should you choose to reply and quote this article, be classy and edit it down to the parts you're responding to. See RFC1855 for further guidance. This advice online dates to 1982, too.)