A Sommelier’s Perspective

By Marissa Payne CMS Certified Sommelier 

Being a sommelier, a wine expert that works on the restaurant floor, is all about hospitality. Yes, I know it is shocking, but we aren’t all old stuffy men that are sent to your table to make you feel inferior about your wine decision. I have been a sommelier for the better part of the last decade and when a guest came into a restaurant I worked at, my mentality was that you were coming into my home. I was hosting you, and I was there to make you feel comfortable, and give you the best wine for you. I was also there to make sure the wine I was serving you did not have any flaws.  

Part of the sommelier expertise is identifying flaws, and unfortunately one that came up at least once a week was Cork Taint or 2,4,6-Tricloroanisole (TCA). Cork Taint is like playing a beautiful song and putting in earplugs, the nuances become muffled and muted. So even if you can’t identify Cork Taint, it still affects your experience with a wine. For a person that has trained in wine, it smells like wet cardboard, and the smell completely overpowers the senses. Interestingly enough, because TCA are natural forming molecules, I have smelled it out on hikes through the woods, and sometimes on the cartons that apples are shipped in.

With the risk of losing roughly 1%-10% of a restaurant’s wine inventory to Cork Taint, it becomes increasingly important for wineries to have a way to seek out TCA and stop it in its tracks. Building a trust with wineries that take the proper measures to eliminate TCA exposure, develops a lasting restaurant relationship that gets passed onto the customers. 

When I was first told about TCA sniffing dogs, I immediately thought, why didn’t I think about this?! I love dogs! I love wine! But truly, the owners of Kismet have much greater patience than I could ever have, making them far better suited for the training required of these remarkable dogs. The potential for the elimination of TCA in wine through the abilities of these dogs is phenomenal and has great potential to change the wine game forever. Maybe even future sommeliers will not have to learn how to sniff out TCA!