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Cork suppliers step toward TCA-free future
Natural cork producers are ramping up their efforts to stay ahead of alternative closures with the launch of new technology that promises to eliminate TCA cork taint....
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How can you have a TCA concentration of 0.5 ng/L in a cork? A litre of cork, or maybe 0.5 ng per cork. or 0.5 ng/L of ‘Releasable TCA’.
Cork will always be a flawed closure. Even if TCA-less, premature oxidation, far more common than TCA, will remain a problem unsolved.
The premature oxidation problem has been solved. It has nothing to do with the physical or chemical properties of cork. It is caused by the incorporation of variable amounts of air and/or oxidants at the time of bottling and inadequate levels of sulfur dioxide.
Big step forward will happen when Cork industry won’t need to kill cork to get rid of TCA, and will separate contaminated cork bark at manufacturing
stage, not when corks are finished. Who is going to use the bad corks? Separate roten apples from good apples before they are squeezed into juice and only take aspirins if you have headaches.
Electronic releasable TCA on the Cork surface? Cork cells are only air tight only untill it is squeezed from 24 to 15mm. They will then explode and no more controls are possible. Are you serious? Shouldn’t wine people cross check this?
Premature oxidation is not caused by cork, but by the erratic incorporation of air and oxidants at the time of bottling. See ‘The random oxidation myth’, Australian & New Zealand Grapegrower & Winemaker, May, 2010.
It is my opinion that TCA in corks and a range of other food products, packaging, wooden pallets, timber flooring and dwellings and shipping containers is largely an environmental problem caused by the profligate use of chloro-phenols as biocides dating from around the 1960s