Fix a corked wine with plastic wrap?
If I open a corked bottle of wine, I’m usually pretty pissed off about it. Though I’ve started saving all my receipts and taking back corked bottles, the culprit is usually some bottle that I’m excited about trying. It happened on my birthday, it happened with a nice Gamay meant to pair with some fantastic mushroom risotto, and on and on…
Well, a friend of mine recently sent me an article that offers a way to remove cork taint from a bottle of wine (the tip originally appeared in the New York Times). While I wouldn’t try the method on an expensive bottle of wine, I plan to try this with the next cheap, corked bottle I get, even if only to use it as a cooking wine later on.
The idea comes from Andrew Waterhouse, a professor of wine chemistry at the University of California, Davis. He says that to remove the cork taint, you pour the wine into a bowl and mix it around with a sheet of plastic wrap. He says that this works because the molecule that causes the cork taint odor, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, adheres to the polyethylene plastic wrap, removing it from the wine’s liquid.
Anyone else ever give this a try? If so, tell us how it worked out in the comments, and we’ll let you know what we think as soon as one of us tries it.
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Sometimes it kind of works (usually with a light contamination), sometimes it doesn’t. I have been experimenting with this method for at least three years. Even when it works (so I can no longer detect TCA), the wine is flat and empty anyway, so I do not bother anymore.
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