Dallas '13 and the groupthink myth of corked wine.

[JimHow]

Ho hum, yet another BWE convention and yet another weekend of virtually no corked wines.
The myth that is corked wine continues.

[Claret]

Only 2 bottles that I counted. We were very fortunate.

TCA is no myth. It is a blight.

[SF Ed]

A badly corked '82 Haut Brion shows me no groupthink, only amazing wine messed up by tainted bark.

SF Ed

[DavidG]

The prevalence of corked wines appears to be decreasing from a high of 8% or so to around 2-4%, even less according to some. We've generally been very lucky at BWE events, but our luck ended with this one. I present as State's Exhibit One the badly corked 1982 Haut Brion. I wasn't aware of a second corked bottle on Saturday but maybe it got taken out of circulation before it made it to our end of the table. 1-2 out of what, 50 bottles? Sounds pretty typical.

One of the Chateauneufs on Friday was corked. We opened maybe 25-30 bottles, so also pretty typical.

TCA is not a myth. It is guilty as charged. Though I'm sure you've got the lawyerly skills to get an acquittal for TCA.

[JimHow]

I don't think TCA is a myth, but I think the prevalence of it is.
When I look at cellartracker and other sources, I see a very high prevalence of TCA.
We've had extremely low percentages of damaged bottles among the thousands we have uncorked at BWE events over the last 13 years, much, much lower than the percentages I see elsewhere. And then there was the infamous "Chicago '10 Incident," where a whole table at a BWE Saturday night dinner was convinced one of the 3Ls was corked, but not a single person at any of the other tables thought so.
I think a large part of the problem is psychological.

[dstgolf]

An issue often overlooked are dirty wine glasses. They can come out of a dishwasher or be dried with a dirty smelly rag and mimic cork taint. You can usually tell the difference however I believe in Chicago this may have been the case. When glasses were changed/cleaned at our table the wine certainly lost a lot if not all of the off odours.

[stefan]

A badly corked '82 Haut Brion is not something to take lightly. On Wednesday night, when Danny & Danielle came to dinner, I opened a corked 01 Hudelot Noellat Clos Vougeot. So the percentage of corked wines from my cellar for BWE-Dallas was unusually high--2 bottles out of 16; a whopping 12.5%.

[DavidG]

I'm with you Jim. I think that there are probably a lot of wines on CellarTracker that are listed as "corked" which were showing poorly due to some other reason. I'm not so convinced that everyone on CT who flags a bottle as corked actually knows what that means.

Stefan, that's really disappointing. I always feel bad when I bring a corked bottle. Of course it's not my fault, and the disappointment quickly turns to frustration with the closure itself. Stefan, given how few corked bottles we've seen at BWE conventions in recent years, I guess the mathematician in you just had to regress us back towards the mean.

[stefan]

Maybe uncaring mathematics, David, but I think someone up there either does not like me or has a cruel sense of humor.

[Bacchus]

It's real enough. Had an 89 Latour a month ago that was disgusting. Completely undrinkable. What a waste!