Fault!

These days, it’s hard to buy a bad bottle of wine.  Bad, as in something seriously wrong.  It’s so rare that, when we learned about wine faults in the Sommelier Program at Algonquin, they only taught them by description, not by direct tasting experience.

But it happens.  And here’s one:

Craneford Cabernet Sauvignon John Zilm 2004; Barossa Valley (Australia)

I can’t remember when I bought this wine but I’m guessing it was in 2007, back in the day when I paid attention to the reviews of The Wine Advocate (Robert Parker).  Here’s the Parker review that I found online:

The 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon (93% Cabernet Sauvignon and 7% Merlot, aged primarily in small new French oak) offers superb flavor purity as well as delineation. Its dense purple color is followed by sweet scents of creme de cassis and licorice. A big, rich Cabernet with no hard edges, it should age for a decade, but is probably best consumed during its first 5-7 years of life.

I’m also guessing that I paid about $30.

We opened the bottle to have with grilled steaks and here’s what we found:  Colour of medium purple but with considerable brick colour, indicating a wine that’s significantly aged before it’s time.  Somewhat cloudy.  Muted cooked aromas of black cassis and red cherry.  Very tart acidity…tasted like a mouthful of under-ripe cranberries and rhubarb.  On its way to vinegar?  Atypical for Cabernet Sauvignon.  Short finish.  This bottle had about 2 centimetres of deposit in the bottom!

Was it just one bad bottle?  Did something happen during transportation to Ontario?  Or did something go seriously wrong in the winemaker’s cellar?  Here are comments from other folks who bought this bottle, courtesy of CellarTracker:

• one of the worst cabs I've had for awhile
• Flawed bottle: Cloudy wine, sharp mouth - cranberries are a possibility. One taste then down the drain.
• Did I get a bad bottle? I don't think so. I prescribe this for a yeast infection, as it's indistinguishable from pure cranberry juice save for the minty alcoholic finish. The nose could pass for hair spray and the dry cranberry palate sucked my cheeks down my esophagus. I'm thinking that they just boffed this one badly.

OK, so it’s not just one bad bottle.  Something went seriously wrong and it’s not only that I held onto the bottle for too long, although that probably didn’t help.

What happened?  One guess is that the wine was exposed to too much oxygen at one or more points during vinification.  If crushed grapes are exposed too long to oxygen, the juice can begin to turn brown.  Later on, acetic acid bacteria, which need oxygen to grow, can convert the alcohol to acetaldehyde and then to acetic acid (the acid in vinegar).  Winemakers combat these threats by using sulphur dioxide and keeping tanks and barrels full.

I contacted Craneford wines and, to their credit, they replied.  Good on them!  (Winemakers, like most of us, don’t like to dwell on their mistakes.)  Here’s what their winemaker had to say:

I am so sorry to hear you have had a wine of ours that has been undrinkable and in this condition. Since this wine was produced we have changed our winemaking and production team and therefore it is very hard to indicate the exact problem with the wine and if it was an issue with transport or something else. Please review our current team online at www.cranefordwines.com

Please accept our sincere apology, but please do not give up on Craneford Wines!

If you would like please send me your address details and I will forward to you 1 bottle of our current vintage Craneford Cabernet Sauvignon.    

On that basis alone, I certainly won’t give up on Craneford wines.

As I’ve said before, sometimes it’s only by experiencing the bad that we appreciate the good.

For a bonus, here’s a photo of the back label.  See if you can spot the spelling error in the last line.     

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Venting My Spleen

Last month, I wrote about To Cork or Not to Cork, an interesting book about the advantages and disadvantages of using cork to seal wine bottles. 

Because of poor quality control, cork went through a bad patch in the mid-to-late 1980s, damaging the reputations of several wineries, not least in my own mind.  Although the problem of cork taint may have diminished from what is was the 1980s, it still plagues the wine industry.

One of the great challenges to quality control is that cork taint is not necessarily pervasive in a single batch of corks or in the corks used in a single case of the same wine. 

Little did I know that I would experience that variation in cork taint so soon.  Two weeks ago, I opened a bottle of Chateau Chasse-Spleen 1989, AC Moulis en Médoc (Bordeaux) that we had brought back from France many years ago.  (It still had the FFr 97,00 – about 20 bucks – sticker on it.)  In fact, we had brought back a few bottles simply because we like the name so much…and because it’s one of the most reliable producers in Médoc.

That bottle of wine was corked.  Not as bad as some, but worse that many others, say 7 on the blech scale of 1 to 10.  Bad enough to impair any good aromas.

After that one, we still had one bottle left and, expecting the worse and wanting to get it over with, I opened that one last week.

Pleasant surprise.  This bottle, bought at the same time in the same store, was delicious, without a sign of cork taint.  It still had a wonderfully complex bouquet and, although the cassis, black cherry, and plum aromas had faded, it brought forth notes of cedar, mushroom, pine, and hazelnut.

So, the lesson is that just because one bottle in a case is corked, not all bottles may be corked.  But what consumer wants to endure this experience with any bottle of wine?  What a quality control nightmare!    

On a related note, Chateau Margaux (one of the First Growth wines of Médoc) is experimenting with screwcaps for its second wine, Pavillon Rouge.  Decanter quotes Chateau Margaux’s winemaker as saying, “We’ve all been disappointed and frustrated by corked bottles. Another closure would be welcome if it is better.”  Decanter reported that, at a recent tasting organized by Chateau Margaux, a 2003 Margaux red wine sealed with an impermeable screwcap closure was preferred to the same wine sealed with a cork or a permeable screwcap, consistent with tests at the estate.  On the subject of using screwcaps, the Margaux winemaker said, “If we have consistent proof that it works better, I don’t see how we could resist.”

When the ultra-traditionalists in Bordeaux begin to turn their backs on cork in favour of screwcaps, can the well-deserved end of corks be far away?

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Recommended Reading: To Cork or Not to Cork

Bringing wine to the consumer is a long, risky road.  From the vineyard, where weather can make or break a vintage, through harvest and fermentation, where a wine producer can meddle too much (and occasionally too little), to aging (how long and in what), and finally to bottling and transport, there are hundreds of risky choices to be made.

Bottling?  What’s the risk there?  It turns out that bottling, or rather how the bottle is sealed, can be the biggest risk of all.

That’s the story of To Cork or Not to Cork:  Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle.  (Don’t worry…the editor did a better job on the rest of book than with the title.)  George Taber, who previously brought us Judgment of Paris, takes us through the history of the cork as a wine bottle closure and the why and how of alternative closures, such as the screwcap.

Ever had a bad bottle of wine?  Chances are that the wine itself was not inherently bad.  Odds are the wine was “corked”.  “Corked” refers to that unpleasant, musty, wet cardboard smell that can obliterate any other aroma that a wine should have.  Smell it once and you’ll never forget it.  (Read my own sad story about a corked wine here.)

Most often, cork taint happens when a chloroanisole (there are different ones, the most common is trichloroanisole – TCA) is present in the cork or, less commonly, in the cellar.  In the former case, Taber says that tainted corks affect from 3-5% of all wines that have a cork stopper.  In the latter case, the effect on a winery can be devastating, with entire vintages poured down the drain or, in the case of Chateau Latour, rebuilding the entire winery.

Back in 1970s, a corked wine was a comparatively rare occurrence.  Then, starting with the 1986 vintage, a minor problem became a major one as the incidence of corked wines shot up.  Why?  Worldwide demand for wine was increasing, many new producers entered the market, and the need for the traditional bottle closure – cork – went way up.  To meet that demand, cork producers threw quality control, which had never been their strong point, out the window.  Even more infuriating for the wine consumer, many wine producers – even the top ones in Bordeaux  – engaged in a shameful industry-wide hush campaign, refusing to admit that any problem existed, often ascribing the “problem” to uneducated wine-drinkers.  Taber quotes Hugh Johnson,

If all wine-drinkers recognized it, and rejected every tainted bottle, the wine-trade would go bust.  It is worrying to think that its profits depend on its customers’ ignorance.

By the time I finished reading these chapters on the complacency within the cork industry and the cover-up by wine producers, I was ready to swear that I would never again buy a wine with a cork stopper.

This conspiracy of silence existed for 20 years, consumers be damned!  Some producers, especially in Australia and New Zealand, rebelled and began to search for alternatives:  agglomerated corks (still risky for taint), synthetic and plastic corks (poor seals, not suitable for wines meant for aging), crown caps (cheap image), glass stoppers (elegant…my favourite), and cork’s main competitor, the screwcap.  Taber takes us through each one of these closures, with their advantages and disadvantages.

In the case of screwcaps, the biggest disadvantage is reduction:  the airtight seal traps ongoing chemical reactions in the bottle that can result in various unpleasant sulphur compounds.  (Cork allows these odours to escape over time through the gradual exchange of oxygen.)  But these aromas of rubber and rotten eggs tend to be less recognizable than cork taint.

Which is better, cork or screwcap?  Which evil is lesser?

That’s where Taber leaves us.  Cork producers have improved quality control, but cork taint continues to exist because hundreds of slipshod cork producers are still in business.  Each type of closure has its rabid supporters.  But none of the closures is foolproof, and research continues.

It’s a great read and very well-researched, although you may have to be a wine fanatic to get through every page.  But if you are a fanatic, you’ll love it.

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Corked!

Sometimes you need a bad experience with a wine to remind you of how much some things have improved.

Back in the 80s, when I really started getting interested in wine, it wasn’t that unusual to get a bottle of wine that was “corked”; i.e., spoiled by a cork that was infected with 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA to its enemies…it has no friends). Conventional wisdom and common experience was that poor quality corks spoiled around 1 out of 8 to 12 bottles. That frequency has gone down, thanks to two factors: the rise of screwcaps and artificial corks as well as improvements in the quality control over corks. Certainly, my experience is that corked wines are fewer and farther between.

But memories of the bad old days came back to us a couple of weeks ago when we opened a bottle of Chateau Leoville Las Cases, AC Saint-Julien 1986 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our first date. (Chateau Leoville Las Cases is a second growth Bordeaux from the famous 1855 classification.)

It’s a wine that I had bought about 20 years ago in anticipation of just this occasion. Storage conditions were faultless.

But I was somewhat suspicious about its condition as I noticed that the cork had pushed its way slightly above the lip of the bottle (maybe a couple of millimetres).

We took the wine to Beckta to celebrate. But after the folks at Beckta very carefully removed the cork, it was clear that the cork was in poor condition: mouldy and damp.

The wine was undrinkable (we did try), perhaps the worst case of cork taint (old, wet cardboard) that I can recall, even though its colour was still surprisingly youthful with no signs of aging even after 25 years. Much like us (ahem).

Fortunately, we had ready access to Beckta’s wine cellar and the evening remained celebratory in spite of our disappointment with the wine.

But it was a strong and smelly reminder of how disappointing wines from that era could be, and how poor quality control was, even at a top winery.

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