So what does cork wine taste like? I've got a cork bottle and uncork bottle, some cardboard. We're going to do a little taste off. That's all coming up. Hello, hello, hello, welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel. I am your host, Matthew Horky. Welcome back to the show where we help you drink adventurously so you can expand your palate and expand your mind. And we're going to be expanding minds and expanding my palate with cork wine. So what is cork wine? It's a very misunderstood term. Cork wine is not little pieces of cork in your glass. That happens when the cork show they break off, but that's not a cork wine. Cork wine is a wine that's kind of been infected almost with a molecule known as 246 Tricloroanisol, also known as TCA. That's TCA tank or cork tank. For all those that were chemistry majors like me, I wonder if that molecule gives you nightmares about organic chemistry one and two. How does this happen? It happens because there's a fungus that sometimes infects a cork tree, the cork bark. And in a cork manufacturer, they usually bleach and sterilize these cork stoppers before they package them and send them out to different producers. And what happens if there's that fungus in the cork and the bleach comes in contact with that TCA is born is formed. Everybody has different sensitivities to TCA. I've been at big tastings where some people picked out that a wine was cork and others said no, it's definitely not corks. You know when I was first getting into wine, I remember one of my original wine mentors who were talking about cork. I said that never smelled it before and he looked at me and said once you smell it, you'll never forget it. So how often does cork wine actually occur? I see figures going anywhere from 10% to 6% to less than 1%. I can tell you this, last year producers set me 715 bottles of wine. Of those 715 bottles, six of them were corked. So that's less than 1%. Actually a lot less than I thought. Three of those bottles, over half of them, occurred in a tasting I did in the same day. I was going through and doing some of my tastings with the clikiness I had this cork and I came across this bottle and it was definitely cork. This is the Tannuta Cavaliere Pepe Brancato 2018. This is Fianno de Avellino from Campagna, Italy. I'm so glad that there were two bottles because the second bottle was really, really an excellent bottle wine. A cork bottle wine is not the producer's fault. You know, it happens sometimes. That's why many producers around the world are going to screw caps, glass enclosures, plastic, or even synthetic corks. So what does cork wine actually taste like? I see a lot of videos, a lot of articles out there, people saying that it tastes like cardboard, it tastes like wet dog, and saying all these things, but they're not actually tasting the wine in real time or they don't even have cardboard or anything next to them. So we're going to do a taste off here today. I've got my cork bottle, my uncorqued bottle, a piece of cardboard, even prepared and soaked a piece of wet cardboard, and it even have an old musty cardboard box right here. So we're going to come, we're going to taste and compare. You see some alleys and some people, once they pulled the corks out, they smell it. I've heard before that a lot of times it's silly, that's BS, but you know what? I usually can pick up the signs of TCA in a cork. So let's compare here. When I opened the wine, the aroma definitely started to come out. Let's compare it to the non-corked wine. Comparing the two, the cork bottle definitely has this cardboard wet paper old dirt kind of smell. I don't know about wet dog. The non-cork bottle is definitely more fruity, more explosive. Let's compare the smell of the cork wine to all the different types of cardboard here. Okay, the the dry cardboard a little bit, it does smell a little bit like the cork wine. Let's give the other one a smell here. The cork wine doesn't smell like wet cardboard as much as I thought. Let's try the cardboard box. So the wet cardboard and the dry cardboard are closest to the cork wine. Let's do a taste test. You know, I used to think of cork wine actually as tasting like or smelling like my grandma's basement. My grandma used to have a kitchen in the basement. That's what we hang out all all the time, all the dust, the dirt, a little bit of mustiness that's what it smelled like. When I do this taste test though, I actually have to say the wine does taste and smell more similar to me tearing open this dry piece of cardboard than the wet cardboard or the cardboard box. Let me see if this actually works if I put the cardboard into the good wine and see if that works. Pretty close. So what do you do if you get a cork bottle of wine, whether you buy it from a shop or a restaurant or in a supermarket, wine specialty shops and restaurants should take back that bottle of wine, give you a refund or replacement. Supermarkets, I don't know if you can be so lucky. So I hope this helped you out. If you really want to experience cork wine, I guess the closest thing would find a piece of a fresh cardboard, tear it open, smell it and give it a little bit of taste. I hope you found this video useful. Stay tuned for a future video. I'm going to do the Serran wrap trick and see if that clears out the cork flavor in this bottle of wine. I will see you at the next episode. Hello, thanks for watching. Yeah, you made it to the end. Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, click the bell so you know when new videos are out. If you like content like this, check out our Patreon page where you get some behind the scenes exclusive content. Thanks for watching. Cheers!