Uncorking the Industry
Courtesy of
30 Second Wine Advisor
By
Robin GarrIt's hard to believe that it has been only five
years or so since the concept of sealing quality wines with anything
but a natural tree-bark cork seemed like a weird and offbeat idea.
I think I had been talking about it for years, but looking back
over the Wine Advisor archives, I didn't write my first article
about the topic until Nov. 1, 1999, in a sermon titled "Farewell
to the cork?", I noted, with "gee whiz" surprise, that the
industry was starting to take a closer look at synthetic closures,
beer-bottle-style "crown caps" and even the much-maligned metal
screwcap. But it all seemed speculative and way off.
"Don't laugh! It could happen," I wrote, but added, "It's going
to take a lot of experimentation before the wine industry can be
certain that synthetics, crown caps and screw tops have the
durability to protect wine during long-term storage; and it's going
to take a lot of marketing before wine lovers give up our attachment
to the traditional cork. But I wouldn't bet that the old-fashioned
cork won't eventually go the way of the LP phonograph record."
"Eventually"? Why not now?
Less than a year after that article, Plumpjack Winery, a
boutique-style Napa operation, garnered headlines with the
announcement that it would put up about half of its 1997 Reserve
Cabernet under screw caps, selling for a cool $135. (The bottles
with traditional corks went for $10 less.) Less upscale wineries
soon tried a variety of synthetic stoppers. Screwcaps turned up on
bottles, especially white wines, all over New Zealand and Australia.
Ditto the U.S., and then California's zany Randall Grahm announced
that his Bonny Doon wineries would go cork-free -- the entire line
would be bottled with screw caps.
Attitudes were changing fast, and few wine enthusiasts seemed to
mind finding a synthetic cork or a screwcap on their bottles any
more. Europe was the last bastion, perhaps in geographical
solidarity with Portugal, where cork-oak producers, a major
industry, mounted a strong and well- financed rear-guard action,
declaring that artificial corks were as bad for the environment as
auto exhaust, and bringing no less than Britain's Prince Charles
into the chorus.
But even those last walls are falling now, as came forcibly to my
attention this week when I came home with a couple of French whites
from the just-arrived 2004 vintage, prepared to pull the corks, and
discovered to my pleased surprise that there were no corks to pull.
An inexpensive Gascogne white from Domaine de la Salette was plugged
with a flesh-colored synthetic; and a modest Macon-Villages from
Verget proudly bore a metal screwcap.
When traditional wines of France start arriving with alternative
closures, it's a sign of the Millennium ... and I don't think it's
over- reaching to suggest that we are close to or perhaps past the
tipping point. It still won't happen overnight, and I expect that
the finest, most expensive and ageworthy wines will be the last to
go over, even though sticking stubbornly to natural cork means
accepting a non-trivial failure rate. But I now believe that it
won't be another five years before we see the majority of quality,
premium-level table wines routinely equipped with screwcaps. Remind
me of this in 2010, if you will.
But what about aging? One of the strongest criticisms
consistently leveled against alternative closures is that the wines
don't age in the same way, and possibly not as well, as with natural
cork.
In my best judgment based on considerable tasting, I think this
argument has merit when it comes to synthetic corks. Wines stoppered
with the solid type synthetic (SupremeCorq and competitors) do not
seem to hold reliably for more than a year or two in the bottle
before oxidizing prematurely, and there's been a spate of litigation
by angry wineries over this. In a separate complaint, this type can
be fiendishly difficult to get off the corkscrew, and there've even
been reports of them damaging more fragile cork extractors.
The composite synthetics with a smooth skin that surrounds a
foamy interior (Neocork and competitors) may be a bit more
impervious to air and easier to extract, because they are
consciously made to replicate the density and
coefficient-of-friction of natural cork; still, the manufacturers
themselves now recommend against using them for wines intended for
long-term storage.
But this argument is slightly bogus in that synthetics tend to be
used primarily on wines intended to be drunk up in the first year or
so after bottling, anyway. Use them as intended, and there should be
no problem. If your merchant is selling "tired" wines as current
stock, that's another story, and its moral is "buyer, beware."
As for screwcaps, evidence mounts that oxidation is not a
problem; the issue there is the exact opposite: "Reduction," a
chemical process that occurs in wine aging in the absence of oxygen,
can cause odd, funky and downright unpleasant aromas in wine. The
good news is that these "reductive" aromas are temporary, not
permanent, and a skunky, cabbagey wine can be restored to its
original quality with vigorous aeration and the old wine-maker's
trick of dropping a clean copper penny into the glass to "bind" the
stinky sulfur compounds.
It will likely be years yet before wine collectors ultimately
decide whether age-worthy wines under screwcap age in the same way
as those with natural cork, and for that reason I don't see Bordeaux
first-growths and the equivalent under screwcap any time soon. But
for most of us, the jury is in: The metal screwcap, long ridiculed
as the symbol of cheap, nasty wines that come in gallon jugs, is
probably the best available closure for quality wines. You heard it
here first, and you'll probably hear it here again. |
