Want to Look Cool When the Waiter Asks You to Taste the Wine? Do This

If you only pretend to know what you're doing when you taste a newly opened bottle of wine in front of a date or a gaggle of friends, you aren't the only one. The server, accommodating as they may be, isn't actually concerned with what you think of the wine's flavor; they're giving you a chance to check whether the bottle is "corked," sour or spoiled. Because of that, you don't actually need to sip the wine, though it's perfectly fine if you do. To flaunt an air of sophistication, simply give it a big whiff, since a bad bottle is usually detectable by smell alone. An estimated 1% to 7% of bottles are corked -- we'll explain what that means below. Knowing what to look, taste and smell for is paramount in rooting out a corked bottle of red or white and avoiding having to pay for spoiled wine. To get the skinny on corked wine, we turned to an expert for tips. What is corked wine? "A corked wine is caused by a compound called trichloroanisole, or TCA, which contaminates the cork, bottl ... Read full article.