Do all wines need corks?
It is a time-honored tradition more than two centuries old to use corks to preserve wine. The fact is that most wines could be sold without using cork as a stopper. Since 90 percent of all wine is meant to be consumed within one year, a screw cap will work just as well, if not better, than a cork for most wines. Wines with potential to age for more than five years are much better off using cork. But also keep in mind, for those real wine collectors, that a cork’s life span is approximately 25 to 30 years, after which you d better drink the wine or find somebody to recork it. What is a “corked” wine? By some estimates, 1 to 3 percent of all wines have been contaminated and spoiled by a faulty cork. The principal cause of corked wine is a compound called TCA, short for 2,4,6-trichloroanisole. Some of my students describe the smell of a faulty cork as a dank, wet, moldy, cellar smell, and some describe it as a wet cardboard smell. It overpowers the fruit smell in the wine, making the wine
