by Max Hauser » Wed Dec 10, 2008 3:28 pm
I can't answer not having smelled the wine, but the following info has been useful in resolving such mustiness/TCA questions, arising in the regular ongoing blind tastings I attend with very experienced people.
A TCA metaphor I use that others have found apt is cardboard mildewed after being wet with chlorinated swimming-pool water. Some people may like that language because it's vivid, but its point is to include elements some descriptions omit, and here we get to the point useful in discerning TCA cork-taint smell from simple mustiness or mildew (which surface as faults too, in some wines).
For TCA to form by the usual route in corks requires both the organism that generates it and available chlorine (typically from a cleaning agent in cork production, I understand). TCA smell has a chloriniferous edge, like chloroform and other simple chlorinated hydrocarbons. Everyone has smelled this edge who's been in a bathroom cleaned with chlorine bleach, or near a chlorinated pool. In those situations you may also smell free chlorine gas, but light organic molecules that become chlorinated have a distinct smell feature you can come to know if you encounter them. Some of those molecules are used in pure form as common organic solvents, and while those tend to be toxic, not something you want to smell much of, I find an olfactory feature common to all of them that I call a chlorine-bearing edge. It usually distinguishes TCA from other smells that otherwise overlap it. (In the table wines I know, TCA fault has other typical symptoms too -- it develops in the aroma on standing in the glass, and unless very faint it perceptibly suppresses fruit in the flavor.)
Anecdote: A capable US winemaker I sometimes taste with makes long-aging wines and is determined to avoid TCA. As part of quality control, his staff takes sample lots from each new batch of corks and immerses them for a period in clean Chardonnay wine. If any TCA is present, they can detect it this way. But the side story is that the resulting Chardonnay is the oakyest anyone has ever seen (because, he reminds us, the corks are made from oak trees).
Now I have a question for anyone who knows: Is TCA is as frequent in fortified wines as in regular table wines?