Help! the cork just crumbed
It happens to us all sometimes: opening a bottle goes wrong and cork crumbles into the wine. Don’t panic. The most practical solution is to filter with a thin cloth – I have a piece of muslin I keep exactly for this. You can also get fine mesh sommelier filters that do the same job. If you don’t have either of these to hand, decant the wine slowly and you should be able to separate most of the cork fragments.
The good news
Bits of cork in the wine do no harm to the quality of the liquid. If you can fish them out or separate them, the wine will be as good as ever. Contrary to the mistake many wine novices intuitively make, bits of cork in the wine have nothing to do with the wine being ‘corked’.
Corked wine
When we say a wine is ‘corked’, we mean it has a particular, unpleasant smell which is somewhere between chemical and mould. That smell is also often characterized as ‘wet cardboard’ or ‘wet dog’. It is if anything more intrusive on the palate, and it makes the wine impossible to enjoy with any pleasure. It is a doubly pernicious fault as when the bottle is first opened it can be hard to perceive, but with aeration it becomes increasingly obvious. By then, of course, you may have told the sommelier that the bottle is fine and accepted it. A truly good sommelier, of course, will have intercepted the faulty bottle before it gets to your table, but don’t judge her or him if they haven’t, as the best of us can sometimes miss cork taint (at first). Very low level cork taint can be hard to detect, but it can still significantly dull flavour and interest in a wine.
The genesis of cork taint
Wines become corked when they are sealed with a cork contaminated by cork taint. Cork taint derives from certain pungent organic compounds produced by fungi. There are of course fungi in the forests where cork oaks grow and have their bark harvested to make cork stoppers, and occasionally some cork bark gets tainted by these fungal compounds.
The problem was perceived to get worse in the 1980s, probably because as demand for cork grew, cork bark was harvested ever closer to the ground, where fungi was more likely to get a hold. The increasing incidence of cork taint spurred widespread interest in alternative wine bottle closures such as screwcaps.
These days, cork producers are investing in a variety of new methods that seem to be reducing the incidence of cork taint. Producers can also choose to buy premium corks which have been tested for taint.
Uncorked, and corked wine
It’s impossible to know if any given bottle is corked until you open it, and some of the bottles that have left Uncorked (and every other wine merchant) have inevitably been corked. We always replace or refund corked bottles. If you open a bottle you bought from Uncorked and it turns out to be corked, first of all please accept our apologies. Recork the bottle, open something else and enjoy your evening. Then when you can, bring us the corked bottle back to us. We’ll give you a no-quibble replacement or refund.
Get your corks out: corkscrews
Corks should start out tough and wiry, but over time they become more frail. Once a cork gets past ten years of age, it must be approached with care. With that in mind, what corkscrew to use?
First of all, we don’t recommend wing corkscrews, even if they bring back fond memories of student parties. Also known as butterfly corkscrews, wing corkscrews have two levers that rise as a screw is twisted into the cork, providing leverage to withdraw the cork. They are less effort to use than a waiter’s friend, but if the cork is at all fragile, a wing corkscrew is liable to strip out the middle and deposit a shower of fragments into your wine. I do have a wing corkscrew in my kitchen drawer, but only because there is a useful beer bottle opener on the head.
A conventional waiter’s friend involves more effort than a wing corkscrew, but it also gives you more control, and you can manage the cork more gently.
If you are dealing with older bottles (more than ten years of age), then rather than a corkscrew with a spiral worm, a butler’s thief (also known as an Ah So) with two prongs that straddle the cork is more likely to let you get the cork out in one piece. If it’s the first time you’re using one, ask YouTube for a how-to video.
The best solution of all is a Durand. These are combination corkscrew and butler’s thief openers, and the most reliable way to get old and/or frail corks out in one piece. You put the corkscrew in first. Then you put the butler’s thief in over it, down the sides of the cork. Then you work the corkscrew and the butler’s thief out at the same time. A Durand is not cheap, but if you are regularly opening mature bottles then it may well be a worthwhile investment.