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| Good Nose Louisa Belle can find TCA before you can By Emily Kaiser At Cliff Lede Vineyards in the Napa Valley, winemaker Michelle Edwards can’t stop talking about her new apprentice, Louisa Belle. Edwards and Louisa Belle are collaborating on an unlikely experiment to eliminate “corked” wine. If you’ve ever opened a bottle and smelled wet cardboard instead of notes of fruit or spice, then you’ve been the victim of that scourge of the wine industry; it is estimated that up to 10 percent of all bottles sold are corked—that is, contaminated with the powerful chemical compound known as TCA, produced spontaneously by airborne fungi. Louisa Belle—a native Californian with a sophisticated and highly acute sense of smell—can sniff out TCA-afflicted corks. She can’t say much about them, though: Louisa Belle is a dog. Two years ago, Edwards and her fiancé, Dan Fischl, a viticulturist, decided on a whim to try to train their St. Hubert bloodhound to detect contaminated corks. Each morning they’d taint some corks with TCA and then hide them in their backyard. At first it took Louisa Belle a few hours to locate all the bad stoppers, but at a recent demonstration she was able to pick out a tainted specimen from a pile of corks in 15 seconds. Eventually, Edwards hopes, her pooch might be able to help her inspect fresh batches of cork before they get to the bottling line. If the two are successful, they could change the industry. |
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© 2001 - 2008 Emily Kaiser |
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