I hate smelling wine. As soon as the server pours me a splash from the bottle I chose and stands silently beside me, I am hit with the two experiences a fine dining lover fears most: having my expertise tested and feeling like an entitled jerk. It’s why I usually order wine by the glass.
What I’m sniffing for is 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, or TCA, a chemical that smells to me like an indoor swimming pool or wet cardboard and dampens your ability to detect all the good wine smells. TCA usually comes from a tainted cork, which is why people say a wine is “corked.” Humans are really sensitive to TCA, though some are really, really sensitive while others, like me, are a lot less so. Which makes that interaction with the sommelier even more stressful.
To resolve my issue, I flew to Portugal. Most of the world’s cork comes from countries around the Mediterranean, and Portugal produces more than any of them. Perhaps the Portuguese could teach me how to deal with the smelling routine.
The first thing I learned is that cork is tree bark. I’m not sure what I thought cork came from, but I might have guessed paddies or canes. Or maybe wood that they blow a lot of air into using a, I don’t know, cork air blower. Instead, a cork oak tree has to mature for 25 years before it can be harvested, and then only once every nine years. The first two harvests suck so much that the cork can only be used for flooring and Birkenstocks. So it’s a 43-year investment before you get any returns, making it a hedge fund-free industry.
I went to a forest an hour outside Lisbon to watch men lean ladders against trees, swing axes into the bark, peel it off in giant strips, and truck it away while women painted the harvest year on the naked trunks. These forests are often owned by rich Portuguese families who inherit hunting land and pull in that sweet cork money. It’s a sustainable product, not just for the environment but for the Portuguese system of wealth inequality.
Cork factories, meanwhile, are insane. Fear of TCA was so widespread in the early 2000s that the plastic-cork and screw-cap industries exploded. In 2002, Bonny Doon founder Randall Grahm held a funeral for the cork at Grand Central Terminal. That was around the time that Kim Crawford and then Gavin Newsom took me to lunch in New York to preach to me about the virtues of screw caps, which Newsom was using on half of his $130 PlumpJack wines.
So cork manufacturers introduced a level of quality control rivaling the pharmaceutical and condom industries. They run corks through gas chromatography–mass spectrometry machines to test for faults, as if they’re on an episode of CSI. I saw a football-field-sized room filled with people sniffing jars containing every natural cork that came through the factory. I don’t know what they tell people they do for a living, but I hope they lie.
The California-based Natural Cork Council says its testing found releasable TCA at or above one part per trillion in just 0.6 percent of incoming cork shipments, down from a little more than 4 percent in 2002. I returned to Los Angeles relieved that I could refuse all offers to smell wine ever again.
Which is sort of true, but not for the reasons I thought. “At most restaurants, at least here in New York, it’s been smelled and tested away from the table. There are nights I’m not at work when the server might have missed it,” said Torrey Grant, wine director at Leonetta, Jack & Charlie’s No. 118, and the forthcoming The Derby Club. He’s so attuned to the smell of TCA that it will turn his head if he notices it anywhere in the restaurant. “Sometimes it’s White Linen, this perfume that smells like corked wine that older women wear.”
Winemakers tell Grant that 7 percent of their bottles have TCA in the corks, but he thinks they’re relying on outdated statistics. He estimates the actual rate is well below 3 percent. When he points out TCA to students in the wine course he teaches at Syracuse University, they start saying that every wine they don’t like has it. Which he relates to.
“When I first started out, TCA was the easiest flaw for me to identify. It was, ‘Hey, I can show someone that I can detect something wrong.’ There’s so much subjectivity. That was something you could point to. Compared with ‘It’s got layers of complexity,’ I could say, ‘I smell damp basement.’”
The only bottle I’ve ever sent back was at Le Cirque, at the height of the TCA panic. I remember feeling smart. Now I know they had already smelled it in the back and pretended I was right. I’m so glad I can order a bottle and act dumb again.
