In the last 45 years that I have been drinking wine, probably well over a thousand

bottles of wine, I can really say that I have only had 2 bottles of what I had

considered wine that had gone bad and had actually been “corked”. Drinking

a sip of corked wine is something you will never forget once it has happened to

you, trust me on that! It doesn’t mean that the cork has slipped, moved, let in

damaging air (because all corks can do that) but in fact it means that the cork

has been attacked by fungi in the presence of chlorine used in the manufacture of

wine corks. Bluntly, it tastes like hell! You will spit and throw it away or return it

to the place you bought it, if recently purchased, and want to ram it up one of the

assorted orifices of their body. It’s bad.

What I want to relay is what the cork can do to your stored wine, subtlety. You

can detect something different but you can’t put your finger on it. It happens to

everyone who likes a certain wine, buys a supply of it for your home, and then

something happens and the next bottle doesn’t taste the same as the last ones.

What happened? Did my taste or memory of how it was supposed to taste change?

Possibly, but more than likely, the cork messed around with the wine and affected

the taste from the last bottle you tried. Years ago, there was a brewery in

Dubuque, Iowa called the Dubuque Star Brewery. It was an old, very small facility

and it had a reputation, other than being dirt cheap, that the beer never tasted the

same in any two different bottles. Well, that can happen to a wine that is bottled

and stored with a natural cork (tree bark for God’s sake) stuck in its top.

The cork is porous as it has veins and fissures running through it and even though

it is squeezed fairly tight in the neck of the bottle, it can still shrink allowing

movement, saturate and let fluid permeate it causing leaking and let air (oxygen)

into the wine letting it change in flavor in a bad way. Have you ever gone into a

huge barrel room in a winery? With all those wooden barrels, what is the first thing

you smell in the sealed barrel room? Wine! What is the color of the barrel in the

middle of its side around the “bung” plug made of wood or cork? Red wine stain.

That wine is breathing during the barrel fermentation. A wine bottle is a small

barrel with a natural stopper – cork. It will, at some time, be susceptible to all the

nasty things that can happen to natural cork. For that reason, when you store wine

in a too warm of a place at home (my favorite horrible place that I see people store

wine on the top of a warm, vibrating refrigerator) you will see the wine age quicker.

It will have pressures that are not to be considered normal and the wine will not

hold and mature as it should in cool dark place like a cellar.

People that store wine with a cork in it standing up in a cupboard is also a real

problem sitting there waiting to happen. Wine is heavy, air is light, the cork dries

out and you have bad wine. Don’t do it. Sunlight is bad too but that is another

addition to be attacked later.

What is the bottom line? Buy wine to drink within a reasonable time. If you drink

it soon, you can darn near store it any place and any way you want with little or no

chance of damage or premature aging. If, however, you are going to buy a case

and want to drink it over the next few months, store it in a dark, cool place on its

side like an internal closet or wardrobe. Even in the refrigerator is better that on

top of it! If you don’t want it to change as fast but store it longer at home, buy

good wines with screw caps. Don’t knock it – they really, really work! Ask the

Australians!

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