Long time lurker, first time poster.

So I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and travel up to the wine
country quite often, as do some of my friends. So one of my pals goes
up there and apparently, from what they tell me, they stopped by one
tasting room, and it was during normal business hours, and they were
closed. They determined that the place must have gone out of business,
as these are som unfortunate times for certain smaller and lesser
known businesses I believe. So while they were getting back in their
car, they saw that the dumpster was full, overflowing with junk. Some
of that junk was HUGE sealed bags of UNUSED corks. So they grabbed two
bags of them, and brought them back for me. They didn't tell me about
them right away, and I was absolutely excited about it. I asked them
if there were any more, and they said that "the dumpster was full of
bags of corks." But by that time, the trash had most likely been
emptied. Argh!

So these two bags were still sealed, and I opened one up (looks like a
gross to me) and they are nice looking corks, not composites, or
composites with cork discs on each end, but solid corks. So I've been
thinking about using them, but then I thought to myself, "Well, what
if they weren't from an out of business vineyard? What if they were
tossing these because there was something WRONG with them? Why risk my
wine on them?" But I then thought, "Relax, don't worry, have some
homemade wine. They're probably OK."

Any way I can tell? I smell them and they smell...well...like corks.
They look...you know, like corks.

Plus, two gross would almost get me through this year's run. Free
would be a good price.

Regards,

Deadend