Malaise of the Cork Screw-tops sounding better all the time. BY LANCE SPARKS I'm amazed by the speed of time. Earth spins on its axis at a thousand miles an hour — the speed of a day. It flies around Ole Sol at 18.5 miles per second (about 60,000 mph); that's how quickly our seasons and years blow by. Like the wind? Chump change. It's the first of May 2006, and our gardens are busting out shoots, buds and blooms. For a brief moment, the rains have quit, and a pale blue sky arches over sweet, clean air in the south end of the Willamette River's verdant valley. It seems only minutes ago when ground froze and crunched under our feet; a withered Christmas wreath still hangs on our back fence, a crumbling reminder of deep winter warmed by colored lights, crackling fires and generous hearts feasting together. Minutes ago, I swear. This is my monthly column #105 (or so), marking almost nine years, a hundred thousand words about wine and related subjects. (OK, since our slog into the quagmire of Iraq, with associated issues of torture, corruption and fiscal madness, my column took some peculiar twists, but I don't feel the least apologetic; in fact, I wish I could have done and said more in service of the genuine values of this beloved country.) This calls for reflection and evaluation, a toting–up of the columns. Start with basic purposes: my original intent in these pages was to serve EW readers by helping them access wine — one of civilized life's sweetest pleasures — that seemed good value, that is, best quality for price. I haven't spent many words on wines accessible only to the very wealthy; sure a Leroi Chambertin is great pinot noir, but at $900/bottle, how many EW readers could care? Besides, grand as Leroi might be, is it 90 times better than a $15 bottle of deep-flavored Witness Tree 2004 Chainsaw Pinot Noir from Oregon? Maybe, to somebody, for some reason, probably having to do more with values other than flavor complexity and satisfaction. Real people who want real wine for an evening meal are the folks I write for, and I see no compelling reason to change. Have I done enough to help readers become more wine-savvy consumers? Hmm, could improve here. Might as well start today, with a little chapter on "cork disease." Think that tasting ritual in restaurants — sniffing the cork, sipping of the first pour — is all bluff and dumbshow? Uh-uh. In most cases, the experienced imbiber is checking, not for a wine "turned" to vinegar (rare, usually occurring in very old vintages), but for bad cork, what the pros call TCA (trichloroanisole), a chemical condition in wine that is (variously) described as smelling/tasting like wet newspapers or moldy basement or some equivalent. Distinctly yucky. Stop, don't make anyone else at your table taste that guck; send the bottle back and get a fresh one. And don't worry. You will not be charged for the bad bottle, and the restaurant will give the bottle back to the distributor for credit and will not lose money. Note: Retailers should react the same way, taking the bottle back, proffering a freshie, all happy. I'll be returning two corknasty bottles — Can Feixes 04 Penedes, normally a lovely Spanish white, and Caravaggio Montepulciano, usually deep and yummy red — to Sundance; the guys won't blink, will simply guide me to new bottles (or price/variety equivalents), no woofing or mugging involved. Without getting too technical, what wine-folk call "cork disease' or "corkiness" can be a nasty problem in wine. It begins with using cork as the closure to a bottle, not a bad idea when we look back into the history of wine. Oxygen is the enemy of wine, and, of course, we also want to retain the liquid in the bottle. Couple hundred years ago or so, winemakers started cutting corks from cork oak trees, primarily in Portugal; they sealed the bottles effectively (as long as they were kept moist; hence, the practice of laying bottles on their sides for storage). But problems developed having to do with microorganisms living in the bark and interacting with the wine, resulting in spoilage. Too, corks broke down over time; anyone who has tried opening an older wine has experienced corks that just crumble when pulled. The problem of the micro-crawlies was solved (sorta) by putting the corks through a chemical wash of chlorine bleach, but it's perhaps that very process that yields TCA, or "corkiness." And cork "disease" is way more common than industry marketers want to admit; objective analysts in recent research have set the percentage of "corked" bottles as high as 8 percent, about one bottle per case. Winemakers and corkpersons argue for a much lower figure, more like 1 percent, but out of millions of cases produced, that's still millions of "corked" bottles. Honest producers abandoned the denial defense when consumers came back saying, "So there's nothing wrong with this bottle? Your wine just smells like my dog after a romp in a mud puddle?" And even though cork producers improved their harvesting practices and lowered rates of TCA, many producers went over to synthetic corks and, lately, all the way to screw-tops (my favorites). Cork lingers as closure for wine largely because marketers worked so long and hard to associate wine quality with a cork in the bottle. In effect, they've dug their own trap, but change is coming. Find Argyle 2004 Pinot Noir ($19), tasty, honest pinot — with screwtop. When top-quality producers like Argyle make the change, the others follow, consumers benefit, and the world of wine is a little brighter without "cork disease." There: I feel better already.
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