Corked Wiskey

Corked doesn't mean that there is literally a cork in the booze.

Well first, I'm not sure it can happen to alcohols other than wine, so I don't think the term can even apply to bourbon. Someone else might know the answer to that. When a wine is corked, it has had a chemical introduced at some point in the bottling process (usually by the cork, hence the term) that causes it to smell like mildew or a wet dog. It's ruined wine.

Really not interested in arguing this. Sure, whiskey can get "corked" too I guess, but again, it's not a piece of cork falling into the bottle that is causing the bad smell. It's a contamination. So your problem, having a piece of cork inside the bottle, will not cause the bourbon to become "corked".

This is just a semantics thing. Your bottle is not corked because the piece of cork fell inside.

The term "corked" refers most often to cork taint, or trichloroanisole (TCA). It is a fault in the wine, not always from the cork, but more often than not, which is why it's called "corked" and not "tainted." I've never heard of it happening with whiskey, but since some whiskey bottles are enclosed with a cork, I guess I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. It gives off the odor of a wet dog or wet cardboard, and even in wine it is very, very rare, occurring in less than 3% of all cork-enclosed bottles.

Anyway, like KJT said, what happened to you is not that your whiskey got corked because the cork fell in it. If the whiskey was corked, it would taste corked whether the cork itself fell into the liquid or not. You just had a shitty cork that fell into the bottle. I don't know of any other phrase that applies to that phenomenon.

The term for what happened to you is "cork failure" not "corked."

You're a big whiskey dude. Ever had a bottle or heard of a bottle with cork taint?

Yes, but its very rare. I've never bought a bottle that was corked, however, a friend of mine did and brought it over for us to try. It was kind of interesting, not super off-putting like with wine. Cork failures don't lead to corked whisky though. I've had plenty of cork failures in my day.

Here is an article that my be of interest: http://inebrio.com/thescotchblog/?p=100

Can't imagine it would dissolve the cork all that quickly. Alcohol is casutic, but it's not hydrochloric acid.

edit: just read the article linked above. Think this quote says it all:

The cork's been touching the liquid anyway, if the bottle's been on its side. If alcohol "dissolved" cork, we wouldn't use it to close bottles.