Stop and smell the bouquet … but learn to leave your wine corks alone

Nation's Restaurant News, August 28, 1995 by Ronn Wiegand

In restaurant after restaurant, I continue to see servers and customers caught up in one of wine's most intriguing rituals.

When the cork comes out of the neck of a newly opened wine, the servers or wine stewards who have done the cork pulling often take a quick sniff of it and then place it within arm's reach of their guests, who, in turn, pick up the cork and smell it.

Whenever I witness this scene, I am tempted to ask both servers and guests two questions: (1) Why do you smell the cork from a newly opened wine bottle? and (2) What does the cork's smell actually mean?

In fact, I have asked both questions in recent years of dozens of servers and wine drinkers. Their answers can be summarized as follows: "We smell corks because everyone else does it and because when corks smell bad, then the wines also taste bad."

Is there any truth to those answers?

Yes, most people do smell corks because they have seen other people do it. However, this is hardly a good reason for implementing a wine ritual: Some people still use swizzle sticks to knock the bubbles out of sparkling wines, too.

But the primary reason that the ritual is a hollow, even pretentious one is that the smell of the cork really doesn't have much to do with the condition or quality of the wine from its bottle.

You can prove this yourself. Take several corks from recently opened bottles of red wine -- or white or blush wine -- and cover their brand markings with neutral-smelling tape. Then smell each cork. Can you pair the cork with the correct wine? Is there an obvious link between the cork and its wine? This is a fun exercise to do at a server meeting.

The answer is of course not. So, if corks cannot be matched with the wines that were contained in their bottles on the basis of smell, how likely is it that the cork contains definitive information about the taste and quality of the wine in the bottle? Not very.

This being said, I understand people's fascination and preoccupation with newly pulled corks. On the one hand, examining and smelling the cork helps pass the time for nervous or anxious guests who are waiting for servers to fill their glasses and leave the table.

And, on the other hand, corks do change in appearance and texture over the years; they eventually wear out. Whenever the cork's all-important air-tight seal is broken, it is definitely cause for alarm. Too, wine corks can be a breeding ground for molds, which give wine a musty or "corky" aroma and flavor. When pronounced, this same musty aroma can be detected on an infected cork.

But having tasted thousands and thousands of wines over the past 25 years, I have learned that a brief visual inspection of a wine cork provides circumstantial information about the cork itself: its quality, dimensions, stage of deterioration and so on. And, perhaps, it also shows how the wine may have been stored; for example, a very dry cork suggests a low-humidity storage area.

However, the small of the cork relates to the quality or condition of the wine in the bottle about as much as the smell of a cardboard box has to do with the quality or condition of the fruit or produce packaged in it--which isn't much.