Greetings!  This new page is designed as a spot for me to answer questions, provide information, and, once in a while, vent!  I'll add essays to this as I go; right now, enjoy the following blurb about corked wines, which are more common than you might think.  Also, I'll add reviews of wines I've tasted in various industry events, and provide advanced warning about upcoming goodies.  Thanks for indulging me on this particular soapbox!

WHAT IS A "CORKED" WINE?

Ever had a wine that smells of wet, moldy cardboard?  Where the fruit seems completely absent, and the wine REALLY disgusting?  Chances are you've just opened a "corked" wine.  My experience shows an average of about one of every fifteen wines closed with real cork has this taint.  Obviously, this is a bit of a problem.

What causes this problem?  Good question - there's a number of possible causes.  The most common comes from the way in which corks are processed.  To remove impurities, they're frequently rinsed with some form of chlorine, followed by an extensive wash and rinse.  If some of that chlorine is left, it forms a compound called Trichloranisole, usually called TCA (yes, I'm over-simplifying this a bit - for a complete explanation, read The Oxford Companion To Wine's excellent section on this).  This creates the aroma I've described.  It takes very little to do the job.  There's a number of other molds and suchlike that can cause problems as well, each adding its own peculiar aroma to the blend.

What's the solution?  In my opinion, for wines meant for short term or no aging, using a synthetic cork (which do have their own problems) seems a good answer.  For wines meant for long-term aging, a refinement of the methods used to produce the corks is being worked on, with some success.  The solution for that bottle you've just bought that smells truly awful is to bring it back whence it came - we CAN return them to the distributor for replacement.  I'd hate for anyone to think I recommended a bottle that could smell THAT bad!