How can you tell if a bottle of wine is corked?!
How can you tell if a bottle of wine is corked?
Is there a sure foolproof way to know?
Answers:
Corking is caused by wine coming into contact with a contaminated cork while it's aging, so just having bits of cork in your glass does not count. This just means that the corkscrew has been pushed too far in and has pierced the bottom of the cork.
The wine itself (not the cork) will smell very, very bad - kind of like when something goes a bit mouldy.
The taste of the wine would be a bit like vinegar (some people even compare it to paint-stripper if it's really bad but never having tasted paint-stripper I can't comment!) and it would be really lacking any fruitiness too.
However if the wine is served extremely chilled it's sometimes hard to notice as much. If it warms up a little and starts to taste bad then you are still well within your rights to comment on it.