Word: taint
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...years of tradition, more and more winemakers are turning away from cork closures - and oenophiles are finally getting used to the idea. Bonny Doon, a boutique winery south of San Francisco, had used Portuguese cork for 19 years, but was losing 0.5% to 2% of its wine to "taint" - the unmistakably moldy or musty smell and taste of a contaminated wine, caused by a compound called TCA, which is sometimes found in cork. So, the winery decided to make a change in 2002. "It's not a lot, but it's enough," says Burke Owens, Bonny Doon's marketing director...
...favorite wine stopper. But like many long-lived gastronomic rites, the custom ran into trouble when globalization kicked into high gear. In the 1990s, world wine production exploded, and to meet demand, cork makers started shipping products that, to many, weren't up to snuff. Increased concern about cork taint led wineries like Bonny Doon to look for new ways to seal their wares. Between 2000 and 2005, the global demand for wine corks dropped about 20%, according to a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report...
...stopper," says Carlos de Jesus, Amorim's marketing and communications director. "My problem is a cork stopper that ends up at your table tomorrow and it could stink. The guy making bad quality stoppers is what we worry about." De Jesus says winemakers' strong reaction to cork after the taint problems was all wrong; yes, perhaps the cork industry, which more or less enjoyed a world monopoly on its product until about the last decade, had grown complacent and needed reform. But the material itself should not take the blame, he says: "Cork has given us all the great wines...
Screwcap proponents would argue that cork?s unpredictability has driven this trend. Taint is part of this, but so is another factor: oxygen. A typical wine cork contains millions of air-filled cells, but because every cork is different, some winemakers think they cause inconsistent aging of the wine. Screwcaps let in less air, and since their cellular composition is man-made, adopters like Bonny Doon say the caps offer a more controlled oxidation process that allows wine to age as the winemaker intended. (Plastic corks, meanwhile, still control a larger corner of the alternative-stopper market than screwcaps...
...talk back to elders, which makes it harder for them to tell predatory relatives to stop or to report them. Asia values harmony, within families and society. A girl knows that to accuse an elder of touching her in the wrong places would embarrass her family and taint her as much as it would the offender...