Wine Excruciast magazine has put its weight behind a new ‘vinous health campaign’ urging people to smell their wine corks before pouring the wine.
Silent menace
‘Cork taint is a silent menace,’ said the magazine’s editor Bark Noser. ‘It kills thousands of bottles every year, and we think that the time has come to do something about it.
‘So from now on we’re urging everyone to say “no way to TCA” and Sniff That Cork!’
Noser says that doing a simple check every time you open a bottle – by snorting the closure vigorously or sticking it up your nostrils for 30 seconds – can have a huge impact.
‘It’s quick, it’s free and it’s around 80% effective,’ he said, ‘which puts it well ahead of your average Italian sommelier.’
Anti-democratic
However Parker Roberts of the Group of Boozy Scribblers Hacks and Industry Taste Explainers (GOBSHITE) was sceptical.
‘We’ve spent most of the last 20 years trying to get ordinary people into wine drinking,’ he told Fake Booze, ‘and now we’re telling them to ram bits of tree up their nose in front of their mates?
‘This could set back the democratisation process even more severely than your average wine magazine.’
He told Fake Booze that it was ‘important that wine drinkers think they’re normal even if we all know it’s not true.’
Not a weirdo
A straw poll of customers outside a branch of Pricefixer supermarket revealed a mixed reaction to the Sniff That Cork campaign.
‘I’m not doing that,’ said John Public. ‘I’ll look like a paedo twat. What kind of weirdo goes round sniffing corks anyway?’
His wife Joanna said that she ‘didn’t have a problem’ with cork taint and that ‘quite often it’s the best bit of the wine.’
‘I’ve got the schist…’
Noser admitted that it would take time for people to come to terms with examining their corks in public but hoped it would soon become as normal as talking to your merchant about yeast issues or a case of the schist.
‘Picking these things up early can be the difference between life and death,’ he told Fake Booze. ‘And actually it’s probably a lot less embarrassing than standing in the wine aisle and playing the video on a bottle of 19 Crimes.
‘Or indeed, just buying and drinking a bottle of 19 Crimes.’
Mammaries are made of this
Joanna Public, however, remained unconvinced by the whole concept.
‘I’m just not ever going to do this,’ she said. ‘Not in a million years.
‘If I want to feel a tit I’ll check myself over for breast cancer thank you very much.’
Learn here about how a large cork producer has discovered a cure for cork taint. Again.
