corks and wine

i've been collecting through the years a special collection of wine i only use for special purposes. most of these are my favorite - silver oak. well, i told myself that if a certain event happened, i'm going to open my oldest silver oak (2001 napa) to celebrate... and yesterday, that event happened. so while we were at dinner, we let the wine decant and finally took a sip of the wine.

my first reaction... "hm." 

aileen's first reaction... "hm."

it definitely wasn't as good as it should be... and my first thought was maybe my palate wasn't clean enough... 

so i tried again... "weird."

the wine definitely didn't go bad, but it wasn't super good either...

we debated for a long time whether to call the sommelier and get his opinion. ultimately, we decided it was best to know for sure, so we wouldn't always wonder if the bottle had gone bad or if it was just us. so the sommelier tried it and said that our wine had been slightly 'corked.' 

my reaction... "##$*&!!!!"

if your wine has been corked, it means that something happened during the bottling process or the cork had gone bad, allowing air and TCA to get into the bottle (i think that's what it means at least). that makes the wine taste less than optimal, and depending on how bad it's been contaminated, still OK to drink. the bottom of the cork was wet, which means i at least stored it in the proper position and i had also kept it in a dark place, so the sommelier concluded that the cork had just gone bad. it was very slight, according to the sommelier, and that he actually would have still served it. we could tell because we knew what to expect.

SO... we decided to just push through and finish the wine (it should be noted that aileen had 1 glass). but it definitely is a bittersweet way of celebrating the big day. at least the sommelier was impressed that we could tell that the wine was very slightly corked.