Stelvin or not?

Salut/Hi JEP,

le/on 12 Feb 2004 06:41:36 -0800, tu disais/you said:-

I think for YEARS people have _thought_ any off bottle was corked. However, from my own (admittedly limited to one family's consumption over 40 years, and therefore statistically meaningless) experience, I can witness to the very considerable increase over the last (say) 20 years. Look, it's actually quite simple, if you think about it. If all wines had always been subject to TCA contamination to the levels experienced today (5-10%) no one would have accepted it then. This has _become_ an issue, because the levels of TCA contamination have risen to an unacceptable level, that's all.

That may be true, but you don't normally store wine in contact with cabbage stalks, or whatever or keep them lying around the winery. As Michael (P) says, if you have a contaminated barrel or whatever, ALL wines made from it will be corked, and that is NOT what happens, you tend to get one or two bottles corked. That makes it obvious that the contamination HAS to come from one of three places:- a) bottle, b) cork c) the capsule. Which of these three has its hand up?

Were the bottles from the same barrel of wine? Was chlorine used as a sanitizer and that was the first bottle through the equipment after cleaning so it picked up the majority of chlorine? Did the bottles come in contact with chlorine and that one just wasn't rinsed properly before filling? Did that one cork come into contect with chlorine in the winery somehow? Is that one bottle the only one that contains TCA that is above the sensory threshold and the others are just below? There are many ways that one bottle can be "corked" while its neighbor is not.

Your point can be said in the reverse, if one cork is TCA tainted, how can the other corks that came in the same bag not be? Why only that one cork out of the 5, 10, 20 surrounding it?

There are just too many variables to reliably trace the source of TCA back, unless it is done right away. We have seen a number of wineries that have traced the source of TCA contamination back to non-cork sources. You certainly can't just discount scientific evidence.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that all TCA taint, nor even the majority, is caused by non-cork sources (I just don't know how much, and no one really can), but I think it is more wide spread than some people want to believe and we need to address both cork and non-cork sources of TCA taint before the problem can be resolved.

Let's not use cork at a scapegoat, but instead address all sources of TCA taint so we no longer have to worry every time we open a wine that is dear to us.

Andy

Ian, you must not have followed the news out of several afflicted California wineries in the past couple of years. As the folks at BV, Hanzell and Gallo Sonoma (other labels including Rancho Zabaco, Frei Brothers and others I don't remember) can tell you, cellar TCA contamination does happen. Just about any wood product can host the mold that leads to TCA, from cardboard to wooden barrel racks to the barrels themselves. Add chlorine use in the winery and you have the recipe for (as you say) many, many corked bottles - exactly what has happened at these wineries. So in these cases, that *is* what happened. According to this article, which you might want to read,

*all twenty* bottles the Wine Spectator received from that Gallo facility were corked, at an average 3 parts per trillion - perhaps not high enough to be identified by those of us blessedly insensitive but still plenty corked enough to hurt the wine.

- Mark W.

Very few places, mostly in Burgundy, will bottle straight from the barrel. Most will blend the contents of many barrels in a tank prior to bottling, to avoid gross variations in flavor and aroma.

Chlorine is really not used as a bottling line sanitizer anymore. Hot water or steam are used almost exclusively nowadays. Chlorine is an oxidizing agent. Nobody desires wine to be in contact with chlorine, with or without the bacteria present to cause corked wine.

Did the bottles

Bottles are not rinsed with chlorine anymore for that very reason. More often than not in the USA, bottles are blown out and the air in them displaced with nitrogen or CO2, and there is no actual sanitiziing procedure that is used. More often than not, brand new glass in new boxes is used, eliminating much of the need to sanitize the glass.

Corks, at least in the USA, come to the wineries in bags of 1000, sanitized with SO2 gas. It's just a matter of opening the bag and dumping it into the cork hopper. No place for chlorine contact.

Is that one bottle the only one that contains TCA

True, and often, other corks have TCA but in lower concentration, and it is not noticed that the wine is "corked", but it may taste a bit off in a more generic way. Face it, everyone has already examined other factors and rejected them as being the cause in at least the vast majority of cases.

Who said they weren't tainted? However, it is reasonable to assume that some are tainted to a greater extent, and some to a lesser extent.

Who discounted scientific evidence? On the contrary, the evidence has been examined scientifically, and it's been found that it's the quality of cork currently available which is the primary factor. Listen, I'm a scientist and a professional winemaker. The investigation has been done, properly and scientifically. I have no idea why you think it hasn't. What do you think we've been doing for the last 20 years in the industry? Why do you think there's been a proliferation of other closures recently? Just because of the industry clout of "big closure" (a play on "big oil")?

e resolved.

OK, you can do that. I'll work on eliminating the problem in my wines, and you can waste time looking for the mythical "second shooter".

Craig Winchell GAN EDEN Wines

Kumeu River is one NZ winery (their wines have been regulars in Wine Spec Top 100 for years!) which was plagued with TCA contamination - upwards of

15% of all wine was "corked".

This occurred across the spectrum; whites (barrell and stainless fermented) and reds; vinted in a very modern winery - as close to being sterile as possible.

They changed one thing - they now bottle under Stelvin closures *for all their wines* - including their ultra-premium chardonnays and reds.

The result = zero TCA spoilage.

I rest my case!

Nobody ever said that TCA can't exist in the winery. As I said in a previous post, since wine is typically blended and mixed in California prior to bottling, one would expect such TCA to be uniform in all bottles from that tank, since the tank contents are homogeneous, whereas the big problem is not low levels of TCA homogeneously throughout the bottling, but rather the 10% or so of noticebly corked bottles of wine. Some cellars have noticeble, and perhaps unacceptable levels of TCA, but that's not a problem for the industry, only for the individual wineries which experience the problem, if it compromises wine quality.

Craig Winchell GAN EDEN Wines

Salut/Hi Mark,

le/on 13 Feb 2004 08:53:28 -0800, tu disais/you said:-

To some extent that's true Mark. Just as I'd not expect you to be aware of changes - say - in legislation surrounding Haut Montravel, or the situation in Saussignac, so I don't really keep up with what happens in some californian wineries. Bergerac is of marginal importance for you in the USA, and California is of marginal interest for me in backwoods France (we simply never see the wines).

I believe you, and I would guess that it will be easy to differentiate from cork TCA, for all the reasons we've been enumerating. I'd not want you to think I'm denigrating the industry in CA, but world wide, cork TCA creates FAR more problems than any other.

Craig, what part of Ian's post - "As Michael (P) says, if you have a contaminated barrel or whatever, ALL wines made from it will be corked, and that is NOT what happens, you tend to get one or two bottles corked" - did I misunderstand. The fact is, in the cases I mentioned, thousands - more probably millions - of bottles were affected. I don't know if you read the article at the link I posted but 20 out of 20 bottles at the Wine Spectator and TCA at between 2.5 and 5.6 ppt (on a small sample) and averaging 3 ppt sounds to me like cellar contamination caused one hell of a lot of detectably corked wine. Ian's post indicated that never happens; in these cases, it did

- that was the entire point of my post.

- Mark W.

Craig, what part of Ian's post - "As Michael (P) says, if you have a contaminated barrel or whatever, ALL wines made from it will be corked, and that is NOT what happens, you tend to get one or two bottles corked" - did I misunderstand? The fact is, in the cases I mentioned, thousands - more probably millions - of bottles were affected. I don't know if you read the article at the link I posted but 20 out of 20 bottles at the Wine Spectator and TCA at between 2.5 and 5.6 ppt (on a small sample) and averaging 3 ppt sounds to me like cellar contamination caused one hell of a lot of detectably corked wine. Ian's post indicated that never happens; in these cases, it did

- that was the entire point of my post.

- Mark W.

OK, since you took the time to post this twice (grin), I'll answer you. I think that Ian was simply saying, in his own style, that what you're proposing is not an industrywide problem, but that the cork problem is an industrywide and insidious problem. I think you might have misunderstood the tenor of Ian's post, and I think Ian and I both misunderstood your refutation of Ian's statement as being an attempt at refuting the sense of Ian's post. Yes, what you're suggesting has happened, as Ian and I will both attest, and I apologize for having continued to address your post as being nonsense. If it didn't attempt to refute Ian's meaning, that the industrywide problem is one of corks and not one of cellars, but instead was meant only to convey that there have been instances of introduction of TCA from some cellars, then it's a valid statement. If, on the other hand, the opposite was true, and you're saying cellar introduction is where most of the TCA problem industrywide has occurred, then it's a false statement. As I prefer to believe that you are simply a literalist, I'll apologize.

Craig Winchell GAN EDEN Wines

Au contraire, mon frere.

Salut/Hi Steve Grant,

le/on 13 Feb 2004 23:01:51 EST, tu disais/you said:-

OK, OK.;-))) Where d'you live that you see a decent Bergerac? Quite a few regulars here will be beating a path to your door!

New York. Sorry, can't remember where I found Chateau Montus -- had to have been at auction. I do remember enjoying the '96.

You're right, though -- it *is* hard to find Bergeracs.

Yeah - cockpit errors, once with a question mark, once without. Whoops ;^)

, I'll answer you. I

I agree with you that in the sense a cellar TCA problem is gone once it's fixed but TCA will be with us as long as we have corks. I'd point out, though, that there will probably also always be cellar TCA problems one place or another, so long as there are wood products in cellars. And when a high volume facility like Gallo Sonoma gets infested, I'd guess they can put out enough bottles to compete with cork-caused TCA in terms of numbers. And who knows how many cellar TCA problems are out there causing sub-threshold TCA levels that make wines less than they could be?

- Mark W.

I'm pretty sure I've seen that at Trader Joe's.

Tom S