Soooo Much Cork

It's been a full February of Cork Sensory.  Everyday the lab bench has looked like this.

First, adorable Portuguese men strip the bark off of cork trees.  It takes about 7 years for the bark to be thick enough to Harvest.

They flatten the bark and literally punch the corks out.

Higher quality cork is punched as far from the outer bark as possible.  This is also more expensive because they have to wait more year between the harvests, but most TCA causing mold is more likely to be located on the bark.

Minimizing the occurrence of TCA in cork is a very important job and the final QC step in sending the wine off to the consumer.  Every cork company and winery does their own version of a cork soak.

At this cork company they soak their corks in a Neutral White Wine.  In my lab I use 10% ethanol.

While I was picking up my cork samples at the cork company, I noticed this instrument.  The corks are soaked in wine on one end and then corked into the plastic tubes to mimic being in the neck of the bottle.  Next, pressure is applied to simulate the passing of time and they get to see more quickly if a cork is likely to leak.

Ok, once I get the samples back to the lab, I get out my jars.  100 corks in 100 jars representing a lot of 50,000.

Each group of 20 represents a single bale of 10,000 corks.  If even 1 of the 20 corks smells like TCA to anyone in the winemaking team, we reject the bale and soak another one the next day.

 After all the corks are in, I fill the jars with 10% ethanol.

The corks are in contact with the liquid for 24 hours.  At that point I pour them out into glasses and the winemaking team comes to smell them.

 
It's very difficult to smell 100+ glasses and still be accurate at the end.  Your senses get accustomed to the aromas and you stop being effective after a short time.  The rose is from Valentines Day.


In addition to taking breaks, we also have coffee and citrus to cleanse the pallet, as it were, like at the perfume counter at a department store.

We don't all always agree on which corks have TCA, so if there is a question I will re-soak the cork and slip it into the next day's sensory to see if the team is consistent and they pick it up a second time.  The TCA in a cork comes into equilibrium with the liquid, so a tainted cork can be re-soaked many times.  Which also means you cannot soak the TCA out of a tainted cork and make it "clean", you just have to reject it.

Also, incase anyone hasn't seen it: SNL Cork Soakers

-Lucia

P.S. This is the 12L flask that I use to dilute my ethanol from 95% to 10%.  It's a pretty awesome piece of glassware.  I liked the way it made the tiny corks behind it look giant.

One of my resolutions for 2012 is to wear more ties.  Here I am wearing more ties.

January was a busy month full of Blending.  This is the time where we start to combine all of the individual vineyards we fermented together to make a larger blend.  We start with about 150 different components and over several blending sessions we narrow it down to a hand full.

This is a lot of work because it involves taking fresh barrel samples every day that we taste, as well as making small scale blends and setting up and cleaning up a whole lot of dishes.

In the lab I make small scale blends, a few (millilitres will represent 2,000 gallons of a certain lot).  These small scale blends lead to large scale messes.

And a lot of dishes.

My table was so abused after a month of spilling wine on it that I had to go beyond a deep cleaning and actually resurface it.

Wearing a bow tie will make 5 hours of buffing seem like a special occasion.

One of my favorite January activities is participating in our semi annual Olfaction Sessions.  A few times a year Alexendre Schmitt, a french perfumer and educator comes to the winery to work with the wine making team to help us refine our sensory skills.

He comes with his tiny bottles of essential oils and we will spend 3 to 4 hours going over "citrus" and the differences between lemon, lime, verbena, orange, orange blossom, mandarin, tangerine, and bergamont.  He dips the white strips into the bottle, then passes them around the table and asks us to describe the aroma.

When describing an aroma, most people would stop at "citrusy".  Alex wants to know which citrus.  Is it acidic and green, waxy, oily and sweaty like Verbena? Or is it cooling, resinous, metallic, and powdery like Orange?  He forces us to be very specific.  We can't describe something as "floral", we have to first specify "white flowers" and then "jasmine with a hint of celery".  This helps everyone on the team develop a similar language when we talk and make decisions about our wine.

During one session we were discussing Juniper and we brought in examples of different gins that exemplified different characteristics.  It's not enough that we start drinking wine at 7am, but now we've moved on to hard alcohol early in the morning.  It's time likes these that I feel like a rock star, or a dead beat alcoholic.

Let me know if anyone wants to know the three different types of strawberry aromas.  Or the difference between papaya and guava.

-L