• Vineyards
  
  
• Update 4/09...Wellington Vineyards, reduced crush.
• To Cork or Not to Cork...
• More about TCA, or Tri-choloroanisole

I currently make my wine at Wellington Vineyards. Just prior to crush last Peter Wellington needed some winemaking help-his long-time assistant Lynda Hansen joined the team at Hanzell Winery, I and I needed a site to produce my wines closer to our home in Sonoma Valley.

I've know Peter since I moved to Sonoma Valley almost 20 years ago, and nothing could give me more pleasure than working with someone who's winemaking, philosophy and commitment to principal I respect and admire. I provide production management, some lab work and some sales work, and in return I enjoy hands-on winemaking for my own wines.

Much as I've enjoyed the past 3 years of traveling across Sonoma County to visit production facilities and vineyards from Occidental to Healdsburg, I am very glad to now have all my wine in one place under my direct supervision.

For more information about Wellington Vineyards and the wines we make, please visit the website at www.wellingtonvineyards.com

I like corks, I enjoy the romance: Cork oaks grow in Portugal; the cork makers strip the living bark from the tree every 9 years, but wine cork grade bark requires at least 50 years of growth. (The first harvest at 40 years is too rough and irregular to use for wine closures.) The bark then ages a season, the producer then grades and sorts the raw corks once, twice or many more times before they reach their final destination. Acres of forest and thousands of people owe their life and livelihoods to this industry. I enjoy the ritual involved to remove the cork; a slight bit of skill, a specialized tool, (and I love collections of cork pullers...), a reminder that gratification delayed is gratification enhanced, an enforced pause that engenders respect for the time in bottle, a nod to times past, a moment's anticipation for the pleasure to come.

Most wine closures perform well; they keep the wine in the bottle, open easily with little effort, prevent the atmosphere from oxidizing the wine, and contribute little or no flavor to the wine. However at least 1-2% of all wine bottled with natural cork develops off-aromas due to TCA-tri-chloroanisole or 'cork taint'-a musty smell that some people liken to the smell of old newspapers stored in a damp garage.

Synthetic corks serve admirably for wine drunk less than a year after bottling, but will allow a wine to oxidize and may render a wine undrinkable after 2-3 years. Screwcaps work; dependable, uniformly non-permeable to air, and free of taint, but they lack romance.

In 2005 I began to bottle my entire production with a natural-synthetic hybrid cork, trade name: Diam. Diam's producers start with natural cork. They grind the cork, sort it by size and remove the harder, less resilient outer bark. They then process the 'pure' cork with very cold carbon-dioxide at very high pressure. This removes all traces of TCA and, as an added benefit, all other woody and 'punky' aromas than can also taint wine. (Coffee producers use the same process to remove caffeine from de-caffeinated coffee.) Once bound with a food-grade resin and shaped to the proper size these closures will seal as well as the best natural cork, but carry no risk of the TCA taint.

I cannot abide the musty taint that comes from TCA. At lower levels it reduces the aromatic richness of the wine, but at high levels it simply destroys the flavor.

Natural corks also vary in density and porosity, this variation allows for differences from bottle to bottle in aging and oxidation. Over a short time, 1-2 years, the differences for most wine are negligible, but after 5 to 10 years the range and experience of the same wine from different bottles may run from extraordinary to disappointing. I am delighted to be able to offer a solution that preserves both the romance and the quality of my product.

TCA forms when mold encounters chlorine. Some think the mold converts chlorine to TCA to render it harmless; free chlorine is a very reactive and toxic compound. TCA does not pose any health risks, it simply smells bad, but it smells bad at very low levels; most people can detect a difference between a spiked and control sample at 2 parts per trillion, (1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000 = 1ppt.) At 6-7 ppt most people can identify TCA as a musty smell.

Chlorine occurs naturally, and is used in many household and industrial processes. In addition many herbicides used to include chlorinated bi-phenyl products; these herbicides were used around some of the cork trees in Portugal. Mold, also, occurs naturally. Mold plus chlorine equals TCA.

Ways to reduce the naturally occurring TCA include avoiding cork bark from the bottom 6-7 inches of the tree. The sorting process that Diam uses to remove the outer bark also eliminates much of the naturally occurring TCA. Eliminating chlorine and the chlorinated bi-phenyls from the herbicides has also helped. In addition the industry has tightened quality control procedures, cleaned up its factories and improved the techniques used in boiling the raw cork.

It's not new-references to cork taint date back at least 100 years, but why does it present such a challenge now? Two reasons come to mind: Paying more for wine causes consumers to hold producers to a higher standard, but also today's winemaking techniques produce more aromatic, more complex, more fruit-driven wines than those of the past; a little TCA becomes more noticeable and more detrimental to current wines.

Higher standards, and more complex, aromatic and fruit driven wines require a clean closure. Screw-caps work admirably, although they can slow the aging process, and they lack romance. Currently the best solution I see is the Diam closure.