Cork Crumbled Into the Wine? What to Do (and Whether It's Ruined)

The corkscrew goes in, you pull, and the cork gives way in the middle. Half comes out on the worm. The other half stays wedged in the neck, or drops into the wine with a little shower of crumbs behind it. It's one of the most common small disasters in wine, and with old bottles it's close to a rite of passage.

Here's the reassuring part first: the wine is almost certainly fine. Cork in the wine is a nuisance, not a fault. Wine Spectator's Dr. Vinny makes the point neatly: the wine has been touching that cork since the day it was bottled, so a piece of it floating around for an evening changes nothing. What you need to do is get the wine into a glass without the debris, and, separately, make sure you're not confusing a broken cork with a "corked" wine, which is something else entirely.

First, stop pulling

The moment you feel the cork tear rather than slide, stop. A cork that's broken cleanly, with a solid stub left in the neck, can usually still be extracted in one piece. A cork you keep yanking at turns into crumbs, and crumbs are harder to deal with than a stub.

Leave the bottle standing on the table while you assess. If it's an old bottle, there's probably sediment in it too, and the less you move it, the more of your options stay open.

If part of the cork is still in the neck

This is the most rescuable situation. The best tools for it are the ones built for fragile corks.

An ah-so, the two-pronged cork puller, slides its blades down between the cork and the glass and grips the stub from the sides, so nothing has to bite into the crumbling middle. Work it down with a gentle rocking motion, then twist and pull slowly. The Durand, which pairs a corkscrew worm with ah-so blades, is even more reliable on a damaged cork, because the worm holds the stub in place while the blades support it.

If all you have is a standard corkscrew, try reinserting the worm at a slight angle, so it grips the remaining cork and levers it against the side of the glass rather than pulling straight up through the weakest part. Go slowly. Our guide to opening an old bottle of wine covers the tools and technique in more detail.

If you have to push it in

Sometimes the stub is too soft or too deep to grip, and the practical option is to push it down into the bottle. That's fine, with a couple of cautions.

Push slowly, with the bottle upright and pointed away from you and anyone else. A full bottle has very little headspace, and a cork forced down quickly can push wine up and out around it. Once it's in, the cork will float, and when you tilt the bottle to pour, it tends to drift into the neck and plug it, so the wine comes out in spurts rather than a stream. Dr. Vinny flags exactly this. Pour slowly, or better, don't pour from the bottle at all; see below.

There are inexpensive cork retriever tools, a handle with long wire hooks that slip past the cork and catch it from below, for fishing a whole cork back out. They work, but they're a fiddle, and on an old bottle they stir up the sediment you were hoping to leave behind. In most cases it's easier to leave the cork where it is and get the wine out around it.

If crumbs fell into the wine

Cork is light, so most crumbs will float, and some fine dust may hang in the wine or sink slowly. None of it will harm you, but nobody wants it in their mouth. You have a few ways to separate it.

Fishing it out of the glass. For a few stray flecks in a young wine, a clean spoon or the tip of a finger works. Not elegant, but not a crime either.

Straining. Pouring through a fine-mesh strainer, a rinsed cheesecloth or a coffee filter reliably catches cork fragments, and it's the method most sources recommend. Dr. Vinny suggests one trick that keeps things tidy: rubber-band a piece of cheesecloth over the neck of the bottle and pour through it. Rinse the cloth with water first, and avoid anything that smells of detergent. Straining has its downsides. It does nothing for fine sediment, which slips straight through the weave. The wine gets a good dose of air as it splashes through, which a young wine may welcome and an old one may not (more on that in Decanting vs. Aerating Wine). And, as our FAQ points out, paper filters are often bleached and cheap cheesecloth can be made of plastic, neither of which you particularly want in contact with good wine.

Pouring carefully. A slow, steady pour into a decanter will leave much of the cork behind, especially if it has sunk or is clinging to the glass. Floating pieces, though, tend to ride along with the wine toward the neck, so expect a few to escape.

Siphoning. This is where a siphon earns its place. Floating cork sits at the surface and sediment sits at the bottom, and a siphon draws wine from just above the deposit, so the clear wine in between is what comes out. With a siphon such as the Jory, the bottle stays upright and still, the wine never passes through the cork-strewn neck, and nothing gets filtered or aerated along the way. If cork has crumbled into the bottle, you can use the Jory as normal: it won't draw up any of the cork, so the crumbs stay behind in the bottle with the sediment. It takes about three minutes for a 750ml bottle once started, and the bottle needs to sit higher than the decanter. For a bottle that has both cork debris and sediment, which is the usual situation with an old bottle that just fought back, it handles both problems at once.

Whatever method you use, if the bottle is old, give it some time to settle upright after the excitement of the extraction before you decant. Our guide to decanting wine with sediment walks through every method step by step.

Broken cork vs. "corked" wine

This is the part people mix up, and it matters, because one is harmless and the other can't be fixed.

A "corked" wine has nothing to do with cork crumbs. It's a wine contaminated with a compound called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, or TCA (and occasionally related compounds such as TBA). TCA is one of the most potent odor compounds known. The Australian Wine Research Institute cites an aroma threshold of 1.4 nanograms per liter in one Pinot Noir study, about 1.4 parts per trillion, and some of its tasters can pick it up below 1 ng/L. Corked wine smells musty: damp cardboard, wet newspaper, a moldy basement. At low levels it may not smell obviously of anything; it just mutes the fruit, so the wine seems flat and dull.

TCA typically forms when molds on cork come into contact with chlorophenols, but it doesn't only come from corks. The AWRI and Wine Spectator both note that it can arise in barrels, pallets, cardboard and winery buildings, which is why a wine under screwcap can occasionally be tainted too. TCA isn't harmful to drink, just unpleasant.

How often does it happen? Less than it used to. Wine Spectator's Napa tasting office, which tracked suspected cork taint for years, flagged 3.83 percent of cork-finished wines for suspected flaws, usually TCA, in 2016. For the California wines in those tastings, the suspected taint rate had been as high as 9.5 percent in 2007. Those figures are for wines the tasters suspected, not lab-confirmed cases, but they give a sense of the scale.

The key differences:

• A broken or crumbled cork is a physical problem. The wine smells and tastes as it should. Remove the debris and drink it.
• A corked wine is a chemical problem. It smells musty no matter how clean the cork came out, and it often comes from a cork that looked perfect. Decanting, straining and siphoning won't fix it, because the taint is dissolved in the wine. You'll occasionally see a plastic-wrap trick recommended online; Dr. Vinny tried it and concluded it isn't worth the effort, since it depends on the type of plastic and seems to strip some of the wine's good qualities along with the taint.

A crumbled cork can tell you something about the bottle's history, though. Natural cork is organic and breaks down over decades, so a soft, crumbly cork in a twenty-year-old bottle is simply normal. In a younger wine, a dried-out or crumbly cork can point to storage problems, such as a bottle kept upright for a long time or in very dry conditions, and a cork that's let in air can mean an oxidized wine. So once the cork is out, smell the wine. Clean and expressive means you're fine. Musty means corked. Sherry-like, bruised-apple, or vinegary aromas in a wine that shouldn't have them suggest oxidation. Give an old wine a few minutes before you judge, since a little funk on first opening often blows off.

If it is corked, a retailer will often replace the bottle, and in a restaurant it's perfectly reasonable to send it back.

Preventing it next time

Most broken corks come from using the wrong tool or pulling too fast. Dr. Vinny's observation is that corks more than ten years old need more care when being removed. For anything that old, reach for an ah-so or a Durand instead of a waiter's corkscrew, cut the capsule and wipe the top of the cork before you start, and pull slowly. Store bottles on their sides, in reasonably humid conditions, so the corks stay in good shape.

And when it happens anyway, as it eventually will, remember that the wine underneath is no worse for it. A few crumbs of cork are an inconvenience. The bottle is still worth drinking.