The Wine Knows

During our judging Saturday of 116 Pacific Northwest Rieslings, we had just one corked wine. In fact, the far bigger problem was oxidation.

One might see this as a good trend that we found just one wine infected with TCA, the compound that makes a wine smell like a wet dog sleeping on rotting cardboard in a musty basement.

Here area a few thoughts on that:

-- Of the 116 wines, 42 used alternative closures: screwcaps, Nomacorcs and Supreme Corqs. Thus, 74 wines used natural cork and the percentage of corked wines actually was 1.37%. That's still well below the 5-10% we've become accustomed to seeing.

-- All but two wines were from the 2007 and 2006 vintage. In fact, 70 wines were from 2007, 44 were from 2006 and two were from 2005. This means the vast majority had been bottled within the past few months. Thus, they've had less time to become infected by a faulty cork.

-- Just 38 of the 70 wines from 2007 used natural corks, while 36 of the 46 wines from 2006 and 2005 used natural corks. These older wines had a greater chance of being corked because they had been bottled longer.

-- Researchers believe higher-alcohol wines have a greater chance of being infected with TCA. Rieslings tend to be lower in alcohol, and that was the case in our judging. Of 116 wines, just one wine was above 14% alcohol. In fact, 88 of the wines were 12.9% alcohol and below.

Conclusion? I'm not sure we have one. It was nice to have fewer corked wines, but one might expect fewer in this judging based on the number of young wines, the number of wines in alternative closures and the lower alcohols. On the other hand, the majority of wines from 2006 and 2005 used natural cork and had a greater chance of being corked.