WSA calls for cork action as 3.5m wine bottles are found to be faulty

The Wine and Spirit Association (WSA) has called on the cork industry to introduce a universal grading system in a bid to stamp out cork taint.

This comes after a WSA working group found that around one million bottles of wine are affected by the complaint - a bacteria that eats away at the cork, spoiling the wine and giving it a musty taste.

It also found that three-and-a-half million bottles of wine in total, bought by UK consumers, were faulty in one way or another.

Chairman of the working group Barry Sutton said: "This isn't tolerated by any other industry in the world. It's a serious state of affairs."

But others think the problem could be much worse than the group concluded. One industry expert even accused the working group of "being in cahoots with the alcohol industry" by failing to admit that the only answer was to use screw caps instead of cork.

Mr Sutton denied this was the case, claiming that the group was strictly independent. "Non-cork closures also produce defects," he said. But he added that the group could not say to what extent because the purpose of the study was to look at cork taint.

On top of a universal grading system, the association also wants the industry to look at reducing oxidation in wine. It said that more and more people were drinking wine than ever before and that the industry had to comply with higher standards.

The working group comprised a consortium of 18 companies and the Camden & Chorleywood Food Research Association, which looked at 13,780 samples and concluded that cork taint was present in around 0.7 to 1.2 per cent - lower than the trade had feared.

Previous estimates by industry expert David Howse had suggested that the level of cork taint was evident in one out of every eight bottles of wine.