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Amount (in millions of U.S. dollars) that Auction Napa Valley has donated to support community health and children’s education since the famous auction’s creation in 1981. This year, among the 200 e-auction lots available are the “Howell Mountain Lot”: 13 bottles of top wines from famous reclusive mountain estates and the “Shafer Lot”: a Salmanazar (equal to 12 standard 750 ml bottles) of Shafer Hillside Select. Bidding opens this Sunday, May 28 at noon and closes Sunday, June 4. To participate, go here.

Champagne and sparkling wines don’t ever get “corked.”

Answer: False.

Both sparkling wines and Champagne can be “corked”—that is, tainted with TCA, the chemical that creates a funky odor that makes wines smell like a wet dog sitting on wet newspapers in a damp cellar. In fact, according to the French consulting oenologist and TCA expert Dr. Pascal Chatonnet, TCA is actually easier to smell in sparkling wines than in still wines. This is because sparklers are more aromatically delicate and also because the bubbles have the effect of volatilizing the compound, that is, making it smell more pronounced.

According to Dr. Chatonnet, TCA can be smelled in still wines at a threshold of 2 to 5 nanograms per liter, whereas TCA can be smelled in sparklers at a threshold of 1 to 1.5 nanograms per liter.

“The pleasures of the table reside in the mind, not in the mouth.”

—Charles Spence,

Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating

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