Halliday Wine Companion chief editor Tyson Stelzer discusses scalping

Why is Tyson Stelzer throwing away super-premium wines? Halliday Wine Companion’s chief editor shares his gripe.

I’VE JUST POURED another $150 Barossa shiraz down the sink. Faulty bottles are the bane of my tastings.

I’m a third of the way into my tastings of Barossa reds for the coming Halliday Wine Companion and, so far, almost one in six has been sealed with a natural cork. I always request a back-up of all cork-sealed bottles and the frequency with which I reach for the second bottle is alarming. Almost one in four has been faulty when the back-up has been pristine.

What’s going on? One in 15 cork-sealed bottles were cork tainted, an equal proportion were ‘corky’ – tasting of sappy cork wood – and a further one in 10 were something more covert and more insidious, known by winemakers as ‘scalped’. Natural corks can scalp or strip flavours from wines, producing selective fruit loss. The Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) has measured the exact proportions of particular characters that are stripped from wines by both natural and synthetic corks. Lychee, kerosene, grass and herbaceous characters are particularly susceptible, but what I’m encountering is not systematic stripping. This is blatant bottle variation – sucking the life out of the wine, robbing it of fruit aroma and flavour, and rendering the finish short and astringent. Cork scalping is particularly insidious because there are countless reasons why a wine might be flat and lifeless and, unless you have a second bottle on hand to compare, you’ll probably just put it down to a bad wine. You’ll likely never buy that brand again, which is why winemakers detest it.

Cork taint is a much easier beast to pin down. If you’ve spotted it once, chances are you won’t miss its telltale musty carpet or wet-dog characters again – and you won’t hesitate to request a replacement bottle.

Cork scalping is an altogether different evil. I wouldn’t have known to open back-ups if I didn’t know the makers and vintages, and I wouldn’t be convinced it wasn’t just a bad wine if I didn’t have a good bottle in the wings. But if you open a bottle, would you know the difference? And would you always have a back-up on hand? That’s not always possible, especially because corks often appear on the pricier and rarer labels.

Cork faults do not discriminate on price. The faulty bottles I opened are priced between $55 and $187. I am sad to say I have friends with experienced palates and enviable collections of the great wines of the world who are reluctant to open them without a wine professional present for fear of missing a bottle that isn’t in top form. By coincidence, the good bottles of the scalped wines I opened each scored 96 points, making these the top wines I tasted from each of their producers. These scores will likely qualify them for five-star winery ratings in the next Companion, but they very nearly missed out altogether.

The world’s largest cork producer, Amorim, has been proactive in introducing screening mechanisms for its top corks to identify trichloroanisole (TCA), the chemical that produces cork taint. It recently announced soon-to-be implemented and as-yet-undisclosed systems that claim to reduce

TCA and other sensory contaminants to below accepted sensory thresholds across all of its cork production. But will it address the more insidious and covert evil of cork scalping? And is sporadic scalping simply sub-threshold TCA, sufficient to strip fruit without imposing its own aromas and flavours?

Penfolds chief winemaker Peter Gago recently declared that cork taint has almost been solved. Not two days later, a restaurateur contacted me to say he had a customer order a $6000 bottle of Penfolds G3 and it was corked. Such is the rarity of this wine that Penfolds was unable to offer a replacement. Is cork taint almost solved? Evidently not yet.

So, what to do in the meantime? If a cork is in doubt, always request a replacement bottle. Buy screwcaps or crown seals whenever you have the choice. For brands wedded to cork, DIAM-branded corks have successfully eradicated cork taint and sporadic scalping, with low-level systematic scalping only apparent on comparison with screwcaps or crown seals.

... a restaurateur contacted me to say he had a customer order a $6000 bottle of Penfolds G3 and it was corked. Such is the rarity of this wine that Penfolds was unable to offer a replacement. Is cork taint almost solved?

Evidently not yet.