It can also dull the aroma and taste of a wine, making it flat.
If you’re smelling wet cardboard, you may have a ‘corked’ wine. We hear this term all the time, and no, it doesn’t refer to bits of cork floating in your glass. There’s a compound called TCA (trichloroanisole), that can sometimes be found in cork, and it creates a musty wet cardboard or wet dog odor. It can also dull the aroma and taste of a wine, making it flat. Cork production is much more careful these days (it was found that chlorine was an issue), so cork taint is becoming less common than in the past.