Winery: Tualatin
Brand/Type: Müller Thurgau
Vintage: 1996
Country: USA
Region: Willamette Valley, Oregon
Alcohol content: 11%
Closure: Natural Cork
Appearance: Pale blonde
Aroma/Bouquet: Rotten cork, strong alcohol odor
This is more of a non-review than a review. Why? Well like most things in life, bottled wine has risks and rewards. This is about risk.
All bottles of wine need some form of a closure. Cork is the defacto standard with thousands of years experience. Synthetic corks and screw caps are relatively new options. Cork being an organic material has its risks. It can be flawed and allow air to seep into the wine or worse yet, allow the wine to seep out. Sometimes it can unintentionally add a flavor to the wine. Often this is due to a fungus that is carried by the cork.
A “corked” wine is not a pleasant thing. I had the misfortuane of acquiring an entire case of French Beaujolais that was corked. Both my money, and the wine, went down the drain.
Once again this misfortune has struck again. At least it’s not an entire case this time. The first bad omen should have been the price. I found this in the clearance aisle marked down to $7.99; more than half off.
The next omen was subtle; it’s age – a ten year old wine. More obvious was while uncorking the bottle, the cork broke in half. Worse was that the remainder was damp and smelled of wine. It was rotting. After finally extracting the rotten cork, we sampled the wine. It was bad. Not horribly corked, but it was indeed tainted. Upon examining the cork you could see that the cork had a flaw in it. It looked to have some small grain type defect that likely allowed the wine to infiltrate the cork and between age and handling the cork rotted.
Frankly corks should be a thing of the past. Screw caps work better. Synthetic corks are a compromise. While this won’t stop us from buying wine with natural corks, we will be a bit more cautious on buying older bottles.