Went to a large dinner at a local winery last night, and one of the little sideshows before dinner was their cork guy giving a presentation. He reps the cork maker Ganau, whose U.S. headquarters are in Sonoma and whose cork forests are in Sardinia, and his shtick is that Ganau sterilizes sheets of cork in autoclaves (120 degrees F) to reduce the possibility of TCA to some small number, I believe around 1%. It's interesting that the brochure I brought home with me describes the process and throws around words like "integrity" and "trust" but does not repeat the number he mentioned nor put into print any any actual tested or guaranteed not-to-exceed rates of contamination.
Anyway, it wouldn't have been any problem to listen to the presentation except that he opened his presentation by saying, "Opponents want you to believe that the world is running out of cork. THAT'S A LIE!" That was followed by two more "lies" involving the effectiveness of alternative closures, including Stelvin, and the rate of TCA found in corks. To support that, he made the astonishing claim that he's been in this business and a wine lover since 1981, and in all those years has only had two corked bottles of wine.
That's right, TWO.
At which point I had to interrupt and tell him I've had four corked bottles from this winery alone, "and that's out of about six cases I've bought in four years". He responded that they've only supplied this winery for two and a half years, so his corks were probably not to blame for those problems. I said "Fine, but what I'm actually taking issue with is your claim of having only two corked wines in 26 years. That's of all the wine you drin, where I've had twice your two from this winery alone, and furthermore I run into a corked bottle about every other month." He then said patronizingly that I was probably confusing oxidation with TCA. To which I said, "Not even close. I'm entirely familiar with both." "Well, they're very similar," he persisted, to which I had to reply, "I don't agree with you at all. I blind taste with a lot of wine geeks and we never have trouble discerning between the two. We're talking prunes vs. weeds."
He didn't even address that, just continued the propaganda. Another claim I reacted strongly to was that waitrons open screwcapped bottles where customers in restaurants can't see them because they're so embarrassed. I interjected that the fault here was a matter of education, not effectiveness, but he ignored me and proceeded to fudge a lot of facts and implying that screwcapped wines were more likely to be defective than not. He completely disregarded the difference between drink-now wines and wines you might age for 20 years, implying that concerns about the latter were totally present in the former, such that any screwcapped wine you buy is probably already damaged. He did such a good job with this disinformation that later, at dinner, an elderly couple at my table (but who had been in a different group for this presentation) stated that from now on in restaurants they would refuse any bottle they ordered that turned out to be screwcapped.
Anyway, the guy made me livid. What a flaming butthole! It's absolutely fair that the cork industry gets to make a case for their product--I'm by no means anti-cork for wines meant to age, but the extent to which this guy spewed garbage was egregious. He's a danger to his own cause.
Either he is unaware of this post or is showing extreme discretion (which may be why he has been around for such a long time and is still so well respected).
