Like finding your first gray hair or discovering you need glasses to read a menu, chances are very high that in your wine experience you will open a bottle of defective wine.

Whether at home or in a restaurant, you pull the cork from a bottle of wine and get ready to enjoy your first sip. Instead of the juicy flavors and velvet tannins you expect, you get a nose full of what smells like newspaper left out in the rain. Wet cement, old cardboard, soggy newspaper—all descriptors of the evil but very common "cork taint." And if the wine is that far gone, you're actually lucky, because it's obviously defective.

More often than not, however, the wine will have just a touch of cork taint, making it flat, lifeless or bitter, and the consumer blames the wine, not the cork.

Mimicking the audience in yesteryears' melodramas, all wine professionals hiss and boo when cork taint makes an appearance. Industry statistics vary from 4.9 percent all the way to 15 percent, depending on whom you ask, but the bottom line is that cork taint ruins a significant percentage of wine. My personal experience is somewhere in the middle, at around 10 percent.

But what exactly is "cork taint"? Cork taint is what happens to the wine when the liquid is infected with the dreaded 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, a volatile chlorinated compound of organic origin, commonly known as TCA. But it's not really the cork's fault. TCA can be transmitted to the cork in the forest, the factory, the winery or just about anywhere you find the right conditions, which make it really difficult to eradicate. Not only is it tough to annihilate, but the darn stuff has one of the lowest perception thresholds around.

It only takes a few parts per trillion in the wine to render a nasty aroma, and any wine with greater than 15 nanograms per liter will be completely ruined. UC Davis Professor Christian Buzke, one of the foremost researchers of TCA, recently was quoted as saying "... just one half-tablespoon of pure TCA could destroy all the wine produced in the United States ... ."

Needless to say, a failure rate this high has many winemakers and consumers in a tizzy.

Since the early 1900s, when the culprit TCA was identified, numerous changes (both good and not so good) have been made in winemaking, and technology continues to improve. Early on, wineries and cork manufacturers believed that cleanliness (the kind that comes from Clorox) was the cure. Then they discovered that chlorine actually encouraged the production of TCA in the environment. Along came "alternative closures" such as composite corks, plastic corks, screwcaps, Metacorks and Zorks, not to mention that some winemakers are also using old-fashioned crown caps (à la beer and soda).

I'm not a scientist. In fact I'm probably what Geoffrey Moore considers a "late adopter" of technology (my VCR still blinks 12:00), but isn't using bark stuffed in the top of a bottle these days comparable to using wooden wheels on our cars? It would seem so to the uninitiated, but science and progress have not taken us very far forward in the search for something better. Until recently, Stelvin screwcap closures have been seen as the shining light in an otherwise murky (and smelly) tunnel. Stelvin closures practically guarantee that no cork taint will get in the wine because "no cork, no cork taint."

The greatest barrier to screwcaps has been the obvious lack of drama when you open a wine. Where's the theatrics in unscrewing an expensive wine on a special occasion? Yet when Dom Perignon invented the cork closure in the 17th century (as an alternative to oil soaked rags), he changed the way the wine world made sparkling wine forever.

Unfortunately, the controversy has now turned from the obvious lack of theatrics to the more practical. Namely, there are those who believe that the miniscule amounts of air trapped in the cork actually help the maturation process.

So what's the solution?

The California wine business is a 33 billion dollar industry, and retail wine holds the distinction of being the No. 1 finished agricultural product of the state. Yet it has a history of being one of the most poorly organized industries and one of the most difficult to rally together. Chances are not strong that cork taint will rouse this slumbering giant.

With no real solution in sight and no new technology promising a breakthrough on the horizon, I'm not ready to recommend that you lay down your corkscrew just yet. The whole fight against cork taint would be aided if more consumers knew what it was and complained about it to the wineries, wine stores and restaurants. One of the reasons cork taint is not a priority to the wine industry could be that the consumer continues to cushion the blow.

So next time the dreaded cork-taint monster raises its head at your table, don't drink the wine and don't pour it down the drain; return it to where you bought it and ask for a replacement.

Cara Finn is the owner of The Grapevine, a fine wine and cheese store and tasting bar. She can be reached at 408.293.7574 or at info@grapevine-wg.com.