Or a corked garrafón? After that happened to me, I never, ever, ever bought another refillable bottle here in Mexico. I will only buy the sealed 5 litre bottles to avoid my water tasting like TCA. I know, I’m such a wine geek.
People often think that ‘corked’ wines - that is, wines that have been affected by Tri-Chloro-Anisole (TCA) - are only ‘corked’ because of the, well, cork. And for the most part, that is true. But not always. This sneaky compound can show up even in the cardboard boxes or the wooden pallet that the cases of wines are being transported on.
Or, what if those pallets of wine are on the same shipping container as a bunch of bananas? Yes, I have had many ‘corked’ bananas in my life. I do not recommend.
TCA happens when the ‘chloro’ part in the cleaning process of cork bark interacts with nasty microorganisms on the plant to create an unsavoury compound that makes your wine smell suspiciously similar to those mouldy cardboard boxes in your basement.
Here I go again referencing one of my fave wine writers, who willingly subjected himself to 357 ‘corked’ bottles of wine to determine how many were damaged because of the cork, and how many from other sources (spoiler alert: the cork was the culprit at least 94% of the time).
But that doesn’t mean that corked bananas and garrafóns do not exist! In fact, I encounter them more often than I do an actual corked bottle of wine these days.
Which, come to think of it, is pretty good news for the wine industry.