Drink - Victoria Moore on how to tell the men from the boys at dinner parties

The ability to spot corked wine always sorts the men from the boys. Ask a professional how to identify it and he'll say "you can't miss it", usually adding a fearsome range of negative adjectives for good measure. At this, the layman trots happily away, certain he'd never willingly drink anything that tasted of "fungus" or "bad drains". Perhaps a year or two later, he wonders at his good luck in never happening upon a bottle of wine that's corked. By then, he's probably drunk five or ten of them without realising it.

In the past four weeks, I've had the misfortune to come across four bottles of corked wine. On the first occasion, I was having dinner at a friend's house. Someone had brought a brace of (fairly expensive) bottles of Burgundy she'd bought while living in France and had been saving for a special occasion. The first bottle was utterly delicious. I still had half a glassful when the second was opened and everyone's glass was topped up. My next sip was a terrible disappointment. Where before there had been the vegetal, melting flavours of a good Burgundy was the flat, stale taste of old cardboard. It was quite conclusively corked. Not wishing to puncture the good atmosphere, I sat tight and waited for someone else to point it out. To my astonishment, no one appeared to notice. The second bottle was polished off with the same gusto as the first. I'd like to think that everyone was too polite to say something, but I fear the truth is that they simply didn't realise, which makes you wonder if there's ever any point in lavishing decent wine on people.

On the second occasion, I was at home, eating with a friend. I had provided the Rioja. "Do you think this wine's all right?" I asked him uncertainly. A deeply rooted middle-class sense of social embarrassment and a general shyness mean that I'm never able confidently to pronounce that a wine is corked, even when my taste buds scream that it is. He looked surprised. "It just tastes like any number of ropy red wines I've had." And then I realised. The taste of corked wine is so familiar that, when people encounter it, they simply assume they're drinking poor wine, or wine they don't like very much.

By chance, I had another bottle of the Rioja. I opened it. My friend agreed that this was a different creature altogether. With a control to test it against, we had no problem identifying that the wine was corked. We sniffed the corks that had come out of the bottles. Again, it was obvious which had come from the bad wine, because it smelt very strongly of damp sawdust from a hamster cage.

These are the facts. Between 2 and 12 per cent of bottles of wine - in other words, as many as one in ten - are what's known as corked. That is, contaminated by a chemical called TCA, which sometimes develops on a cork as a result of chlorine bleaching. There's no shame in quietly returning a bottle of corked wine in a restaurant or shop. But - how to spot it?

When you stick your nose in the top of a glass of wine, you expect certain delicious flavours to rise up from it. You ought to be able to smell fruit, or floral, mineral or vegetal notes. Everyone recognises the heady scent of blackberries or a zesty bit of citrus, and you don't even need to be so specific. Have a good sniff. Do you really think you won't notice a general fruity smell if it's there? When all these flavours are absent, it's like opening your front door and discovering there's no one there. The wine feels dead. It's true that some wines take time to open out and unleash their flavours, so give it a bit of time, and a swill round the glass. If you still can't find anything good, then start looking for some of the tell- tale corked adjectives, as bandied around by the experts - a whiff of cardboard or mould will confirm your suspicions. Sometimes people confuse the smell of wood and cork (in either direction), so be aware of that. But, most of all, trust your instincts. Come on, you know what sort of wine you like to have in your mouth. If this isn't it, then get rid of it.

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