Corked Wine

Corked doesn’t refer to bits of cork floating in your wine glass. Natural corks, made from the bark of cork trees grown in Spain and Portugal, can contain a chemical compound called “2, 4, 6 trichloranisole” or TCA. The wine interacts with TCA to create the taint and it’s estimated that 5-10% of natural corks are faulty this way, though that’s improving with more careful practices and better technology. Even a mild case of taint from natural corks strips wine of its expressive aromas and a severe one makes it smell like moldy cardboard. This defect is why screwcaps are coming into vogue: you bypass this issue altogether.