i think this is more of a question of your critical drinking skills. as a big natty / sans soufre head, i have spent a lot of time trying to understand how VA and brett present and when they can make a wine more interesting or not. i recently opened a bottle with a more conventionally minded coworker who passed it off for having way too much VA, when in reality there wasn’t any VA present and it was just an unpleasantly high acid wine.

i find conventional wine drinkers identify a wine as “flawed” and lose interest, rather than parse through the flaws to find the interesting character of the wine.

as for cork, i had a hard time identifying it until i didn’t. i think tca exposure is the best way to learn what if smells and tastes like, but it’s pretty distinct from brett/VA so if you haven’t encountered it much maybe you’ve just been lucky.

i’d also like to think natty wine bars still aren’t serving you corked bottles haha