Cork taint can be transmitted by new oak barrels, says research

There is no question of TCA being found in new barrels. I can think of two sources of contamination from the time the barrels leave the cooperage (presumably inspected for TCA) to the time of use in the winery: 1)cardboard which is used in the wrapping and packaging for shipment abroad --this cardboard may become wet and a source of mold growth. 2)Shipping containers for export all have wood floors. No one knows what sort of cargo these containers may have held prior; any product where chlorine is present may migrate into the wood floors, and then...

3- If I well understand the problem, there is no risk with that kind of contamination to have an entire lot of wine heavily contaminated by TCA ; that is the same problem with cork in a single bottle. But it looks worst! If the winemaker blends one single barrel in the middle of hundreds, potentially all the volume can be affected by a lower quantity of TCA if the barrel has been heavily tainted. In that case, we know well that the wine won’t looks tainted but simply BAD or NOT GOOD and we’ll blame the wine before to think about the cork or the barrel !!!!

4- Why are you talking about competition my dear Chantal? Are you working for the coopers????? I agree you need personally to follow some norms! You are talking about excessive sensibility of the analysis, but who care about that? Are the barrels 100 % safe or not??? That is the only question. As a winemaker, I am really tired to feed coopers with bad wood…..false French oak, false Tronçais barrels, and now real “cork taint”. BASTA.

1- Andrew, maybe any half competent winemaker is able to evaluate its barrel prior the blending but, what does he do with the tainted barrel ?????? One barrel is more or less 300 bottles….Maybe he could sell it as “Tonnelier cuvee” ?

Can't anyone do basic arithmetic here? 500,00 x 0.04% = 200.

I think Myles' math may be a little off as well; by my calculation .04% of half a million is 200.

Craig and Myles - it's 2,000.
Do the math.

It's not unlikely that a barrel could cause this problem. The TCA is produced by a louse in the cork bark, so if this louse lives in oak trees too then it is possible that the problem highlighted here could occur, but I believe Ryan is correct, surely a bad barrel would affect the entire cuvee, not just the odd bottle.

Myles,
It's 250,000 barrels, perhaps out by 100%, but your miscalculation is of a similar magnitude. Decanter- perhaps you could find who sponsored this research-the cork industry perhaps? I'm sick of working my guts out to produce premium wine grapes to be turned into premium wine that is then ruined by a filthy cork! You caused the problem Cork Industry, you wont fix the problem Cork Industry, so deal with it Cork Industry and don't give us some sob story about the Iberian Lynx Cork Industry-you created the habitat yourselves, you are responsible for their welfare not the wine industry that you have disdained with your apathetic response to consumers having their wine occasions ruined by your sloppy hygiene.

This looks like a man with a hammer looking for nails. If a barrel is TCA tainted, it will be picked up by any half competent winemaker in evaluation prior to being blended back into the main batch.

Interesting story, it had saddly become very convenient to blame the cork for just about everything!!

Wouldn't this become really apparent since a tainted barrel would taint 300 bottles at a time and when that wine is homogenized back in the vat the taint could spread tainting an entire CUVE of wine? Thousands of bottles? When I experience TCA (rarely), it tends to be on one bottle out of hundreds. I've never heard of an entire cuvee being affected.

"But Tonneliers de France disputed this, arguing that only 0.04% of barrels produced in the last three years were suspected of being infected with TCA – fewer than 100 barrels out of about half a million."

0.04% of half a million is not less than 100 barrels - it's 20 thousand! That's a lot of bad barrels...

Laboratories are the winners of an unfair competition!
They spend their energy in finding new things to analyse which, with a bit of advertising become a norm which needs to be followed by everybody who wants to stay on the market.
We could think it is a safe way to avoid problems in wine but it is not!

- Each lab develop its own norms.... So you need to make the same analyse in different labs to match the differents protocols of your clients.
- every year the labs have a better sensibility in their analyses. It could be a good thing, but clients allways want a clear analyse.... So if we were safe with TCA in our seasonned woods with levels under 1ng/g.... Our lab increased sensitivity.... and for the first time I found a "positive" lot of wood with....0.4 ng/g.... Not enough to taint a wine.... but more than 0... so I cannot sell it!
Next year, they should be able to detect TCA around 0.05ng/g..... Will I still have some woods OK? I don't know! What the matter if there is picograms of things which are not harmfull for health, an not bad for wine??
Just the pleasure of feeding labs!!

Why don't you call it 'barrel taint' if it comes from barrels? Cork has nothing to do with it.

Never mind
Put the blame on cork!(as usual)