Robin Garr wrote:
I am absolutely certain that it is not possible to eliminate all taint from natural cork. I do believe that extreme quality control - and, for "manufactured" cork, such technologies as ROSA - can go a long way to reduce it. I do not agree that quality manufacture shows only in appearance.
Quality manufacture obviously doesn't only show in appearance, but my point is that at I have never seen a pricing option for bark cork that says 'pay more and we'll guarantee <3% <1ppt.' One listing from Scott Labs, for example, says
'These natural corks have received a light hydrogen peroxide and water wash followed by neutralizing rinses. Corks are then dried to a moisture level between 5 and 8%. They are, quite simply, the cork standard.
Lengths: 54 mm, 49 mm, 45 mm, 38 mm
Diameter: 24 mm
Qualities: USS, US+,US, UFS, UF, UFB, UFB1, UFBB, UFB4'
Unless I miss my guess those 'qualities' have to do only with appearance, not with freedom from taint. Scott Labs do talk about their overall cork QC programs, but you can't pay more for a given cork and get lower taint rates.
And I do very much believe that some producers are neither willing, able or ready to pay the price for high-quality cork to reduce the incidence of taint. Too many producers are too willing to write off a 5 percent failure rate.
This is a straw man, and I still think you're shifting the blame to the wineries and away from the cork producers, where it belongs. Show me a quality winery unwilling to pay more for lower taint; for that matter show me where Amorim or anyone else offers expensive natural cork with anything like a normal 2008 failure rate, at any price. All of my producers are frustrated by cork problems, and many of them pay through the nose for cork. So this particular group of wineries is prepared to spend a small fortune for corks every year, and still suffer from failure rates that would be absurd in any other business.
All that said, my personal experience - and I open a fair amount of wine - is that taint in my experience has fallen off from more than 5 percent to about 1 percent over the past few years, without alternative closures being taken into account.
Your experience isn't consistent with what the cork producers themselves admit is the normal failure rate; for example, a report issued in 2006 by the 'Cork QC Council' stated 'the vast majority of CQC natural corks are now below 2ppt (94%).' Which is to say they admit that 6% are over 2 ppt. My threshold is about 2 ppt, yours may be lower. And we are only talking about TCA here, if we include failures like Random Oxidation or sparkling wine problems it's higher.
And this illustrates one of the things that strikes me as suspect with many industry 'improvements', which is that their standard for 'TCA free' is often 2 ppt. Did they set that level because they thought no-one can smell 2 ppt, or because with the current technology that's the best they can do?
I know a lot of people in the business HATE natural cork, and based on your posts I would respectfully submit that you likely fall into that category. Fair enough. But it's really best not to allow emotion to override logic.
Respectfully, this is a non-sequitur ('hatred of something proves illogic'); anger is a perfectly normal reaction to an infuriatingly high, avoidable failure rate in a product that you love. My understanding of that failure rate, however, is entirely intellectual. As I would have thought this thread would have made clear. If more than one bottle in every two cases broke spontaneously I would be equally pissed.