Wine lovers often enthuse that wine is a living thing. Horsefeathers. A good wine should be dead as a dodo bird. Well, to be more accurate, it should be like a fossilized ecosystem, or a long-deserted ghost town. The first inhabitants of this dead microverse were the yeast that ate the sugar in the grape juice and transformed it into alcohol, flavourful compounds and sometimes bubbles. Unfortunately, these improvident yeast eventually crap themselves out of a habitable environment and die en masse of alcohol poisoning.
After this self-destructive rampage, a wine is supposed to enter limbo. However, sometimes this slumber is interrupted by the intrusion of new forces. When you’re wine comes alive like this, it’s not a good thing.
The most common way a wine reanimates is under the influence of a mold in the cork. This naturally occurring fungus reacts poorly to chlorine compounds that are often used to disinfect winemaking implements. The result is a nasty chemical called 2-4-6 Trichloroanisol (or TCA). This substance is so rancid that only a few parts per trillion are perceptible to the human nose. This wine fault afflicts about 5% of all bottles with corks, and gives us the term “corked wine.” TCA isn’t poisonous, but it reeks of dank basements and wet cardboard.
I thought there was no cure for cork taint, except to shed a salty tear while returning the defective bottle to the LCBO (where you can get a full refund, even without a receipt). However, I was recently at a dinner hosted by two sommeliers, and when we opened an irreplaceable bottle of 1992 Burgundy with the unmistakable odour of a musty dog, they didn’t panic.
Employing something that looked like a folk remedy, they decanted the wine into a pitcher and placed a crumpled piece of plastic saran wrap into the wine. They swished this agglomeration together and then let it sit for 20 minutes. The scientific theory behind this act of voodoo is that the TCA molecules bond with the polyethylene in the saran wrap, thus exorcizing the evil influence.
This is a great trick but not a total solution. Saran wrap purges the moldy smell. However, TCA also suppresses the fruity flavours of a wine, leaving the taste flat and leaden. In fact, wines with low levels of TCA won’t smell particularly bad, but their flavour is still lifeless. I found the plastic wrap wasn’t 100% successful in rehabilitating this injury.
However, if you’re dealing with a wine that you can’t get at the store anymore, employing this device is better than pouring the bottle down the drain. I don’t consider wine a living thing, but such a fate still seems inhumane.
Matthew Sullivan is a civil litigator in Toronto. He blogs weekly here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column also appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca. Follow along on Twitter: @shortcellar.
Image by doner black arm