He also said corkiness happens to only one bottle in a thousand, which is wrong.

Corkiness is not the only problem presented by traditional wood corks.

But corkiness can turn up in any wine, including inexpensive ones opened and consumed the day they are bought.

The most common problem in bottled wine is corkiness.

Unfortunately, few restaurant customers know how to identify corkiness.

And a few seemed flawed, either by poor storage conditions, corkiness or bad winemaking.

Corkiness is the most common wine problem.

One bottle in 12 is tainted by corkiness, many experts believe, a worldwide loss to wine producers of up to $10 billion a year.

Corkiness is found in both young and old wines, which is why some wineries now use only plastic corks.

How does one detect corkiness?

Worse still is corkiness, a dank, moldy smell and taste from badly made corks.

It is commonly known as Corky-stemmed Passion Flower due to the corkiness of older stems.

The problem of "corkiness" is generally attributed to a chemical compound formed by the interaction of moisture, mold and chlorine, which is used to bleach corks.

Corkiness, a moldy, dank smell and taste, is usually attributed to corks improperly sanitized by the producers, mostly in Spain and Portugal.

Writing in the Wine Spectator last June, James Laube, a senior editor, estimated that corkiness taints $2 billion to $3 billion worth of wine each year.

He realized that cork could not be the source of the problem when he found the telltale smell of corkiness in a batch of wine in a stainless-steel fermentation tank.

(Recent research has shown that some of the supposed corkiness was not the fault of the corks at all; it came from insecticides in new wood used when many French wineries renovated their cellars in the prosperous 1980's.