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| Thought Leaders: Culture |
Days of Wine and Closures
George M. Taber
03/01/2008
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For nearly four centuries, roughly from 1600 to 2000, there was only
one way to seal a wine bottle: with a piece of natural cork from the bark of a
type of oak tree grown largely in Portugal and Spain. But in recent years,
Australia and New Zealand have turned the wine world upside down by staging a
revolt against corks—an uprising that has since spread around the
globe.
Winemakers everywhere now have a choice. They can seal their
bottles with a natural cork, a plastic cork, a screw cap, a glass stopper or
even a cap like those on beer bottles.
Vintners fear that using screw caps on only a few products will send a signal that those wines are inferior. |
The rebellion against cork began because so many wine bottles
were being spoiled by a chemical known as 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, which makes a
wine smell like wet newspaper and taste even worse. Winemakers quietly suffered
with the problem for centuries, but finally became fed up in the 1980s, when it
became very prevalent.
The stance on corks varies from country to country. In New
Zealand, 95 percent of all domestic wines have screw caps. In Australia, more
than half of the wines sold domestically have screw caps, but a much lower
percentage of bottles exported stateside have them, because the Aussies do not
think the U.S. market is ready for cork alternatives. At the other extreme is
France, where about 85 percent of wines still have cork closures, while only 5
percent are screw caps and 10 percent have plastic corks. The U.S. offers
noncork closures on only 20 percent of the wines it produces.
Winemakers and vineyard owners also are engaged in the ongoing
debate over how to close a wine bottle. Convinced that they produce a perfect
libation, many winemakers would prefer a screw cap to eliminate the cork taint.
Vineyard owners, on the other hand, are not convinced that American consumers
are ready for that type of closure on quality wines, and remain faithful to
cork.
Instead of a victory for one style or the other, the outcome
may be an entirely new technique that would adapt the closure to the wine. Australians have a colorful expression for this approach: horses for courses.
Run your horse on a short, fast track if that is where he performs best, or go
with a long course if he excels at distance runs. Delicate white wines such as
Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc were the first to move in large numbers to screw
caps, because those wines are very susceptible to cork taint. On the other
hand, the problem is less obvious with a full-bodied red wine. The logical
solution would be for wineries to test screw caps first on the white wines, and
then continue experimenting with alternative closures for reds. Yet many
vintners fear that using screw caps on only a few products will send consumers a
signal that those wines are inferior, while the quality wines still receive a
cork.
Unfortunately, there is no perfect closure. Natural cork,
plastic cork and screw caps—the three biggest players—all have their strengths
and their weaknesses. More research is needed to determine which is best, and
the final answer is likely to be some variation of different horses for
different courses. Closure companies large and small continue to seek a new
product that will be better than anything now on the market. The research
departments of companies making natural corks, synthetic corks and screw caps
are the busiest. Natural-cork producers, which have the most to lose in the $4
billion annual battle for the wine bottle, are investing the most in new
production equipment and research.
Peter Gago, the winemaker of Grange, an Australian icon wine
that retails for $200 a bottle, excitedly told me about a second-generation
glass stopper that he has been testing, which he thinks is superior to the first
glass one that was introduced in 2004. France’s Oeneo, meanwhile, insists that
its Diam—the first truly industrial natural cork product, which removes taint
through a process known as supercritical CO2—is the perfect closure, but the
technology has not yet been thoroughly tested in the market. W.L. Gore, the
maker of Gore-Tex, has been trying out a natural cork wrapped in one of the
company’s synthetic materials. So the best is likely yet to come for consumers
in the great wine-closures war, and wineries will have to keep experimenting.
George M. Taber is the author of Judgment of Paris, about the
historic 1976 wine tasting when Californian wines defeated French ones, and the
new book To Cork or Not To
Cork.
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