The mysterious case of the cork-taint carrots

A few months ago, UC Davis Professor emeritus Linda Bisson — who had some great quotes in my column last week, “Can we learn to love funky wine?”) — told me something that completely blew my mind.

Bisson taught an introductory wine production course at Davis for some 30 years. One of the class objectives was to teach students to identify wine flaws, such as 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), otherwise known as cork taint. Students would be given a sampling of corks, some infected with TCA and some not, and be asked to separate them.

“In the beginning it was 1 out of 100 students, maybe 1 out of 200, who couldn’t detect TCA,” says Bisson. “But then, over time, it started to be higher and higher percentages of the students.” Was an entire generation becoming immune to that aroma — revolting to many wine drinkers, including yours truly — that makes a wine smell like wet cardboard and chlorine?

Then Bisson realized the culprit: baby carrots.

“Those plastic bags of baby carrots — they spin them down, shape them, then bleach them, before putting them in plastic,” Bisson says, “which puts them at a high risk for developing TCA.” The same chemical compound that can infect wine corks, in other words, has infected bags upon bags of processed carrots at the grocery store. Her students had grown up eating these carrots and had become inured to the taste and smell of TCA. In fact, they liked it.

“To them it wasn’t negative,” she continues. Baby carrots, for her students, connoted snacks packed by Mom in the lunchbox; the taste was linked to pleasant memories of childhood. “They were perfectly happy drinking this wine that would turn our stomachs.”

This TCA discussion brings up many of the same issues I encountered when researching my column for last week’s Food section, about the spoilage yeast brettanomyces. Why, I wondered, has a growing contingent of craft brewers embraced brett, which most wine and beer drinkers have long associated with off-putting flavors like horse manure and Band-Aid? I became especially interested in this question when I found out that Napa winemaker Mandy Heldt Donovan, of Merisi Wines, is making an intentionally bretty Pinot Gris. (Maybe not coincidentally, Donovan worked in Bisson’s lab as a graduate student.)

My central question is: Can our tastes collectively change over time, as baby carrots seem to have shifted the palates of the latest generation of Bisson’s students? And is it possible to unlearn what we find disgusting — to rewrite those emotional associations we have with certain flavors or aromas?

Funny enough, these questions intersect with another story I wrote last week — and that one wasn’t a wine story at all. It’s about a different Mandy, Mandy Aftel, a well-known producer of natural perfumes in Berkeley who now operates a “smell museum,” the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents. I highly recommend a visit to the museum, where you can smell substances including hyraceum (the urine and feces of the hyrax, a small, furry mammal) and ambergris (essentially, whale vomit). Trust me when I tell you that both smell amazing — floral, earthy, sweet, fruity.

I definitely never thought I’d find the smell of animal poop preferable to a baby carrot.

Photos by Getty Images