Wine for Real People

A wine blog for the rest of us

Corked- What’s that Mean?

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Bad Cork

A corked wine simply means the wine has gone bad from a contaminated cork

If you hang around wine people long enough, you’ve probably heard the term “corked” thrown around once or twice. Way back when, I thought corked meant that you didn’t finish the bottle, so you put the cork back in to save the rest for later. I thought a corked wine meant that I was showing self-restraint when tempted to drink the entire bottle! This was not the case. To save you from the same embarassment, let’s look at what a corked wine is and how to identify it.

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The Only Wine Book You’ll Ever Need

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I get asked a lot about wine books. The assumption is that you can just pick up any book on the shelf and transform yourself into an expert onwine books wine in a few short minutes.

The reality?

Most books about wine are boring and read like an encyclopedia. If you want to pick up an 800 page tome about French wine laws, rootstalks, malolactic fermentation and key wine negociats, then go right ahead. But when’s the last time you picked up an encyclopedia for fun?

The truth is there’s no shortage of wine books written for hardcore wine people, but most of us just want simple, practical advice that we can use everyday. We want to confidently pick a bottle of wine to enjoy with dinner. We want it to be an awesome pairing that our guests will love. We want to sound like we know what we’re talking about when our guests ask about the wine and the complements start to flow. And we want to be able to do this without studying long hours like we’re trying to pass the LSAT.

When you finally come across a book that helps make the everyday person sound like a wine connoisseur, it’s definitely worth a pick up. In my experience, there’s one book that does this above all others.

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