While not many wines are corked, occasionally we come across one that has that odor of old damp cardboard lurking in some dark crawl space. Yuck! There are different levels of the cork taint. Some wines at the beginning stages of cork taint are so negligible that many consumers may not notice it or more unfortunately taste it and think that wine tastes bad and won’t return to that wine again. At other times, the odor can be so horrendous that it can be smelled from several feet away.

I suspect that when a wine drinker realizes that the wine is corked, they dump their glass of wine or the whole bottle done the drain. But what if it’s your last bottle or an expensive bottle or a bottle with memories attached to it?

A somewhat simple and inexpensive method may help to make the wine drinkable. The suggestion is to add polyethylene plastic wrap to the wine and swirl it. Does it work? The consensus is that the plastic wrap absorbs the TCA molecules

In The Cellarist blog this week, Testing a Fix for Corked Wine, Jon Bonné sets out to determine if the fix for corked wine works. While it is not a scientific study, he does take your through the steps of trying to save a corked wine.  As to the results he comments, “No TCA to speak of. If anything, it reminded me a bit of wines with absolute borderline corkiness, where the taint isn’t detectable except in a certain flatness that’s revealed when you uncork a second bottle. Certainly drinkable, though in a diminished way.”

The next time I have a corked wine, this is a trick I am going to try. At the least, it will be an interesting science experiment and at best, I’ll save a bottle of wine.

Cheers! Kathy