Cork Taint & TCA: is it really a problem?

http://www.openwineconsortium.org/forum/topic/show?id=2000748%3ATopic%3A47170

The link above is to a discussion that a friend pointed me to at Open Wine Consortium on the prevalence of TCA, or 'Cork Taint' in commercially available wines. TCA is sensory active at just a few parts per trillion (like a droplet or two in a swimming pool,) and makes a wine taste anywhere from lightly dulled in fruit to completely musty like wet cardboard and dank cellar, depending on concentration. TCA primarily originates randomly in Natural Cork (wikipedia Cork Taint for a more exact discussion,) but it, and similar malodorous compounds can also arise in other ways, under certain conditions.

Seems that the premise is that wine drinkers might be making a lot of fuss over nothing. Some estimates (usually by pushers of alternative closures,) are as high as 12% of commercial wines affected to some degree. Others (usually Natural Cork companies,) say that the cork industry has gotten its act together and that the level is less than 1%. Seems that consensus points to around 3%, but there are not many reliable studies, and getting a handle on the sample size required to really state anything with statistical accuracy makes even the best guess still a guess

So, there is a lively discussion on the link above, including Arthur from Red Wine Buzz who is putting together a survey, so that all of us can track the incidence of corked wines that we open at home. With sufficient people participating, perhaps we can get a decent handle on about what the level of incidence is - at least in our sample set... Check it out, it could be interesting!