There is probably no greater bummer when it comes to wine than pouring your first glass and picking up that pungent, mouldy cardboard odour wafting off the wine. It is corked.

It happens to $10 bottles of wine, and it happens to $1000 bottles of wine, and it is no fun at all. No matter what you paid for the wine, cork taint has an uncanny ability to deflate many a happy occasion - especially if the corked wine is the only one you have at the time.

This infuriating curse is caused by a reaction of the cork with wine and is usually triggered by air getting into the bottle and doing its dirty work.

But this age-old fungal gremlin might finally have been stopped in its tracks. Microwaves may be the silver bullet answer to a problem that has plagued wine production for centuries and costs the global wine industry billions of dollars annually. The technique, which involves micro waving corks to remove contaminants which cause the wine to taste off, was developed in a two-year $2.4 million project partly funded by the European Commission. Cork taint is estimated to affect between 2% and 5% of Australian wine.

German microbiologist Dr Jens Jaeger of the Neustadt Research Centre, said the microwaves reduced the potential for off-flavours in wine by killing the micro-organisms and drawing out the chemical compounds which caused cork taint. Corks treated by the process, called direct environmental load focused inactivation will be marked with a DELFIN label and be available in Australia early next year.

"Corks will be transported to the microwave device and treated," said Dr Jaeger. "When they come out they are free of micro-organisms and chemical contaminants are reduced to a very low level."

Dr Jaeger was brought to Australia by Portugal cork producer Juvenal Ferreira da Silva, whose corks are supplied in Australia by JB Macmahon. The company's managing director Daniel Macmahon said winemakers and researchers who had been told about the break through believed it was the most exciting development in the cork industry, which has been under increasing criticism recently for its often imperfect product.

At last, it seems there is a God, and He uses mircos!

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