How To Tell If Your Wine Is Corked With Just A Simple Whiff

The nose always knows if something smells off, especially when it comes to wine. Sommelier and co-host of The Wine Pair Podcast Joe Mele told The Takeout that if a wine is corked (also referred to as cork taint), the best way to tell is by giving it a healthy sniff. "If you smell wet cardboard, grandpa's musty basement, or a newspaper left out in the rain when you smell a wine, you are smelling corked wine," he said. It can cause the wine to taste musty, muted, or sour, though this can be more difficult to detect. "Yes, the taste will be off, but it will mostly be the smell that will give it away," Mele shared.

There are a couple of different situations that lead to corked wine, like too much air coming in contact with the wine. Ideally, the cork tightly seals the bottle, thus preventing oxygen from kissing the wine until you're ready to open it. "Oxygen exposure is really the key issue, which is why the wine actually gets worse the longer it is exposed to air, unlike the way a bottle of wine should work," Mele explained. A bottle is also considered corked when the chemical compound 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA) develops, which happens when certain fungi and bacteria that are commonly present in cork bark come in contact with specific chemical cleaners. 

One of the reasons a wine can go bad is a faulty cork, which allows air into the bottle before it has been opened. This process is called oxidation, and it negatively impacts the wine. "You may suspect a wine is corked if the cork has failed when you are trying to remove it," Mele said. It doesn't automatically mean a wine is corked if the cork breaks off in the bottle, but it can be an indication that it might not have been keeping the bottle properly sealed.

"If you see that wine has snuck up the side of the cork to the opening, you may want to check if the wine is corked via smell," Mele added. For this reason, patrons have the opportunity to observe and smell wine whenever they order a bottle at a restaurant and graciously send a bottle back if it smells off. "This is why you are poured some wine in a restaurant before they pour it around the table," Mele explained. "Not to sip it, but to smell it and make sure it is good. And that it is the wine you ordered, too!" 

If you want to pretty much guarantee that a bottle of wine isn't corked, go with a screw top. "You really can't get a corked wine from a screw-top wine bottle," Mele said. "They generally are much better than corks at keeping air out." Plus, you largely avoid the possibility of TCA contamination.