Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [3]
Therefore, marry a pretty girl
after seeing her mother;
show your soul to one man,
work with another,
and always serve bread with your wine.
But, son,
always serve wine.
NOTE: A collaborative book like this will often refer to something one of its authors did, or saw, or drank. It would be tiresome to say “I [Kathleen]” or “I [Michael]” every time. And so we have used “we” in every case. It’s easier on the eye. But it doesn’t mean we were both there. And it’s certainly not the royal “we.”
Metonymy, morphic resonance, and sommeliers, or, is this wine corked?
WE, THE AUTHORS, would not so much as contemplate physical violence toward wine waiters. We do, however, send wine back, sometimes because it is corked. At this point, we note that corking or cork taint is a fault of the wine, not of the bottle. Our title, therefore, relies on the figure of speech (subclass trope) metonymy, in which, according to our dictionary, “the name of one thing is put for that of another related to it … as ‘the bottle’ for ‘drink.’” Our title came before our dictionary research, and we are now convinced that our choice of words is an example of morphic resonance as proposed by Rupert Sheldrake, whereby existing patterns influence future ones merely by existing.
There are, of course, ways of arresting the attention of sommeliers other than by throwing a bottle at them. To ensure their respect, we suggest the following dos and don’ts:
Do send a wine back, saying that it is corked, if it has the characteristic musty smell that resembles mushrooms or the result of striding through the dead leaves of woodlands in the autumn. If the sommelier has sniffed the cork after pulling it, he ought to have already spotted it for you; you might then look him straight in the eye in an inquiring manner as you suggest that it is corked.
Don’t use the term corked to refer to any other fault in wine.
Do send back white wine if it is oxidized or maderized, in which oxygen has managed to slip into the wine through the cork, turned it a dark yellow, and given it an aroma resembling madeira.
Don’t say that a wine is faulty because it has left a deposit in the glass; it may indicate that the winemaker expects his customers to know that the deposit is harmless and to appreciate his reluctance to risk wine quality with the rather drastic processes of tartrate stabilization.
What is corking? The chemical compound 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA for short) is blamed for the corking of wine and is produced by the action of fungi on cork in the presence of chlorine. The fight between the proponents of screw caps and of corks is bitter, and cork taint is the main battleground. A screw cap eliminates the main source of TCA contamination in wine, but also that frisson of excitement when the cork is pulled and you sniff for mushrooms and autumnal woodlands, wondering whether the wine will be drinkable.
Yes, but what exactly is wine?
THE FIRST THING any European should do, when trying to find out what anything is, is to ask Brussels: the European Union will have a definition of and a regulation for it. For example, Council Regulation (EC) No. 1493/1999 of May 17, 1999, on the common regulation of the market in wine, says:
WINE: the product obtained exclusively from the total or partial alcoholic fermentation of fresh grapes, whether or not crushed, or of grape must. (Annex I, paragraph 10)
Two more definitions are needed in order to understand this one:
FRESH GRAPES: the fruit of the vine used in making wine, ripe or even slightly raisined, which may be crushed or pressed by normal wine-cellar means and which may spontaneously produce alcoholic fermentation. (Annex I, paragraph 1)
This has a certain circularity.
GRAPE MUST: the liquid product obtained naturally or by physical processes from fresh grapes. (Annex I, paragraph 2)
Does obtained naturally mean crushing the grapes with naked feet?
Vine in the definition of fresh grapes refers to Article 19, which says that only varieties of Vitis vinifera and crosses