[wine] Ranting about corks

For a change, statistics and not just anecdotes: "James Laube Unfined" (James Laube's blog in Wine Spectator on line) The Year in Corks Posted: 04:14 PM ET, November 06, 2007 "I missed the debate about wine closures in Napa on Oct. 27, which featured To Cork or Not to Cork author George M. Taber, along with other industry experts, who discussed twist offs and synthetic closures. But it reminded me to check on how corks performed last year in our California wine tastings. "In the past year we tasted about 3,600 wines, most new releases, and flagged 325 as being flawed by bad corks, or about 9 percent. "I know cork producers insist they are cleaning up their acts and that fewer wines are marred by 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, or TCA. But our results, all from blind tastings, suggest the problem is as serious as ever, and maybe even worse. At 9 percent, you?re close to having one bad bottle per 12-bottle case spoiled, and that?s absurd. If you add in the 193 wines that we tasted out of twist offs, it raises the percentage of bad bottles even higher, to 9.5. "I blame wine producers as much as cork makers for this problem, since they are the ones that choose what to seal their wines with and the failure rate of corks is pathetic. "We keep hearing the same old refrain about corks, that progress is being made. But if a 9 percent failure rate is considered progress, I wonder what percentage cork makers would consider a disaster?" Note from Russ: Mr. Laube is not a mathematician; one corked bottle per case would be 8.333%; so, nine percent corked bottles is MORE (worse) than one per case on the average. A blog commenter pointed out that assuming the nine percent corked rate prevails industrywide, your chances of getting at least one corked bottle per case are about two out of three, and your chances of getting at least one corked bottle in two cases are about 90%.