Montague 2014 Columbia Valley WA Red Wine - Yuck!

I can't recall how I came by this bottle. My notes say it is about a $20 bottle. At four years old, it should have been pretty good tonight. But out of the bottle, it was instantly and irretrievably flawed! The most awful stink of (I'm guessing:) cork taint! It could have been some other volatile flaw. It really stank. I waited and waited, to see if it would blow off, and it finally did mitigate somewhat, but who wants to wait thirty minutes before they can drink a wine they just opened for dinner?

What a shame. This wine had some nice and fresh dark fruits. But every time I poured some more, it was full of that flaw again.

Maybe the winemaker didn't have a clue. Some problems develop in-bottle. But this is a horrible mark on that winery, whoever they are. You just can't sell wines like this. I hope I don't!

Cellar Tracker reviewers like this one, but the latest post was 1.5 years ago. Maybe it needed to be drunk in just 3 years, but that would be odd for this region and wine type.

 This winery doesn't have a website! This suggests the wine was made for a distributor, by a winemaker who usually works at a publicized winery. Maybe the distributor bought some bad wine cheap and hoped they could market it. Oh, well.

Another great reason to not use oak wine barrels:

Read this scary article!  Opus One sues a maker of wine barrels, alleging cork taint (TCA) in the barrels. Wow.

There are many reasons not to age wine in wooden barrels: They leak. They are expensive. They have a limited useful life. They are more work to maintain. Stacking them in barrel racks uses up more winery space than ceretain other forms of storage. And they can be infected.

There is a better alternative: Simply put the oak into the wine! Oak chips, oak cubes, oak staves. Easy.

Diam corks: A great step forward

Most of us have experienced a "corked" wine, meaning a wine that smells and tastes like a wet dirty dog, or moldy newspaper. That flaw is caused by TCA: 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, which can be transferred from a flawed cork to the wine. TCA can be faint, or it can be so pronounced that it ruins the wine. Although corks are of course traditional for wine bottle closures, screwcaps have gained in popularity because the incidence of TCA in screw-capped bottles is near-zero. 

But along comes Mr. Diam, who invented a process for eradicating cork taint from natural corks. In the Diam process, "supercritical carbon dioxide is used to leach out all objectionable compounds within the cork, including TCA. Then, a polyurethane is introduced into the cork, which fills some of the pores and reduces the permeability of the cork. Because all these steps couldn't be done to a natural cork, the Diam corks (as are many others) are made from "agglomerated" cork--cork that is made from small pieces of cork that have been fused together via heavy pressure.

I have used Diam corks, and I'm a fan. Small producers cannot afford to purchase screwcap machines, which cost upwards of $25k (!). So I am happy that a "safe" cork alternative exists. I predict that many commercial users of cork closures will switch to Diam corks, once they learn of the benefits. The last thing a winemaker needs is for his or her wine to suffer from TCA taint.

Incidentally, the process of taking cork from special oak trees in Spain and Portugal looks ghastly, but it is renewable--it does not kill the tree. The tree regrows more cork bark, and can be sustainably harvested on a recurring basis. 

Photo is from Decanter magazine, whose excellent article can be found here.