Part of the Wine Mastery school. Class 4 of 6.
The capability: you can catch a mild fault, which is the one that passes.
Prerequisites: Modules 15, 28.
The practice
Build a fault reference. Acquire or identify a corked bottle and a heat-damaged one. Taste them against sound wine.
Then taste a mildly corked bottle specifically — because the severe case is obvious and the mild one simply mutes the wine and reads as dull.
Then run a threshold check across the staff, per Module 15 — cork taint detection thresholds vary substantially and a disagreement may be two honest reports.
And practice the resolution: on faults, defer to the most sensitive detector.
The reference
Sound wine alongside, always. A fault tasted alone teaches almost nothing.
What you are building
Recognition of the state that passes.
A mildly faulted bottle reads as uninteresting rather than as wrong — which means it will be served unless someone is specifically checking, and that is what the open-check exists for.
Verification and boundary
Blind: identify the faulted bottle in a flight of four.
Boundary: this confers no wine credential.