Salut/Hi Ken Overton,

le/on Mon, 21 Feb 2005 14:16:44 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

>I've never been formally introduced to a corked wine as clearly
>identified by folks who know those kind of things. Well, last week I
>opened a cheapie -- Penfolds Rawson's Retreat Merlot, '03. By most
>accounts it's supposed to be an innocuous, juicy thing, but this had all
>tannin, almost no fruit and utterly no nose that I could find. I
>sniffed and swirled but nothing came out. The cup was an eerie
>olfactory black hole.

Sounds like "fruit scalping".

>I know that TCA is said to produce unpleasant musty smells. So what
>could explain this?

Those sensitive to TCA say this is also the cause of fruit scalping, so it
could be that you had a bottle that was lightly corked, below your ability
to detect it directly. It's also possible that the wine was merely dumb. A
two year old Merlot could well be just going through a dumb phase, you know.

--
All the Best
Ian Hoare
http://www.souvigne.com
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