It’s impossible to take seriously the figures recently produced by the UK’s Wine & Spirit Association concerning the extent of cork taint in bottled wine. The preliminary findings of the Association’s joint investigation into the level of mustiness in wines on sale in the UK today reports that a mere 0.6% of wines sampled showed musty defects. If this is indeed the case then there must be some truth to the suggestions made over the decades by Australian winemakers that they are getting the worst corks in the world. I prefer not to take this view, and instead question the quality of the sampling and testing procedures that found only 32 incidences of mustiness in 5735 samples evaluated. In my tastings which randomly involve samples of wines made from all over Australia, I have come to expect a background level of taint in the order of 4-5%, nearly ten times the level reported in the UK. Little wonder that the findings were not only met with disbelief, but with open hostility by some members of the wine trade. One hopes that the cork industry will treat this outcome with similar disdain.
