I don’t have much of a wine cellar. The workaday wines stay ready at hand in the kitchen. The wines worth saving I keep in a cool corner of the basement. They tend to get long in the tooth. I don’t keep track of what I have well enough to pull wines out of the cellar at their peak. A few evenings ago, I went looking for something to have with a lovely dinner my wife was making. I found the perfect bottle hiding on a low shelf — a 2003 white wine from one of the best vintners in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Chateau de Beaucastel. We probably should have poured it 10 years ago. But even past its prime, the wine promised to be delicious.
Wine doesn’t always keep its promises.
The table was set, but there were a few last-second preparations before we sat down to dinner. I was looking for the salt shaker and pepper mill; my wife was opening the wine. Or at least, she was trying. She was having trouble with the cork.
The stopper had broken off in the neck of the bottle. She was about to drill the corkscrew in again — this time ever so carefully so as not to just push what was left of the cork down into the wine. And that’s when the oven timer started bleating and something frothy started boiling over on the stovetop, and I found the bottle in my hands. The cork was now my problem.
Corks come in just a few standard sizes, but closures are made in a wide variety of ways. For modernists free from the bonds of outdated sentiment, there’s always the screw cap or plastic plugs made of polyethylenes. But traditionalists have kept in business the business of making corks from cork.
Consider the romance of the “agglomerated stopper.” What particle board is to wood, agglomerated stoppers are to natural cork. Cork granules are bound together with an “agglutinating substance,” and that corky glop is extruded into plugs. The agglomerated stopper may have to be pulled from a wine bottle with a corkscrew, and it isn’t plastic, but that’s about as far as the romance of wine rituals go with this mix of cork-shavings and glue. When you find such a cork in your wine, you know you’ve got a bargain bottle on your hands. The Portuguese Cork Association recommends that the agglomerated stopper not be used for wines that are going to be around for more than two years.
Moving upmarket, you get the “technical cork stopper” — an agglomerated plug with solid cork discs glued on the ends. Does it seal the bottle more effectively? Maybe. But its main purpose is to give the false impression that the winemaker used a proper cork: After all, that’s what you see when you remove the foil capsule. Think of it as a sort of veneer for the most visible part of the cork.
Some wineries use “multipiece natural cork stoppers” that are not unlike plywood, with layers of cork glued together. “Colmated natural cork stoppers” take overly porous corks and fill the holes with cork powder and glue.
But the top-of-the-line are simple stoppers cut whole from dense cork tree bark. I have no reason to think that Beaucastel uses anything but the finest natural cork, but there was no way to tell. As I tried to get the corkscrew to grip, the cork disintegrated into a soggy, grainy mush. The sodden cork meal finally collapsed into the bottle.
It wasn’t until I poured the wine through a fine-mesh strainer and into a decanter that the full catastrophe became obvious. The problem wasn’t mere taint — no wet dog aromas here. No, this was a wine that had gone spectacularly bad. There’s no sniffing a cork when a wine has suffered total failure, and in this case, there was no cork to sniff.
The liquid in the decanter was brown. I would say it was the color of strong tea, but that wouldn’t capture the mustard-yellow hue underneath that warned of spoilage and rot. The kitchen filled with the sickly tang of unintended vinegar.
We didn’t drink it.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
