"This is the first
corked bat of Mantle that we have seen or heard of," Taube added.
And the disappointment of saving a prized bottle for a special event and then finding it is
corked should be more than enough to change anyone's mind about cork being a magical ingredient of the wine-drinking experience.
He made the switch to alternative closures finding three
corked bottles of Chateau Neuf-du-Pape in his cellar in one night.
Corked wines have been the bane of winemakers, and they are a big part of the impetus to use cork alternatives.
TCA is detectable in wine at concentrations as low as four parts per trillion, and although some wine drinkers are more sensitive to it than others, the taste and smell of a "
corked" wine are as unforgettable as the disappointment a sommelier or host feels upon the discovery of a tainted bottle.
Corked wine has been a bane for wine lovers since the development of these natural stoppers, but a hi-tech process which blasts the cork with carbon dioxide is said to remove all traces of the stale taint.
But how many wine drinkers realise that up to 10 per cent of wine bottles are
corked.
Roughly 3% to 8% of all
corked wines develop what is known as cork taint.
For as long as the word cork has been synonymous with sealing wine bottles, it has been associated with the nasty wooden taste that occasionally crops up and which drinkers have bemoaned for centuries as
corked wine.