Abandoning screwcap for cork...going backwards or forward?

[Don Giovanni]

how many more will due to reduction turn their back and change ...

Rusden Wines abandons screwcap for cork

Click On me

I say screwcap wines drink now... let the experiment continue, but not with my wine( that is personal consumption wine) ...

Quote: "Our wines are handmade and bottled without fining or filtration. Under a screwcap I have noticed the wines ‘sweat', producing overly dominant reductive characters, a problem we have never had under cork," he said.

Quote: Last year iconic South African winery Klein Constantia returned to cork to seal its premier white wine, the Perdeblokke Sauvignon Blanc. The decision was driven by concerns over reductive characters under screwcap.

[ScottyBoy]

Box wine fo' life!

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Box wine: it's what's on the table! And in Ecuador, if it's in a box, it's not quite wine, but it's Clos!

Edit: I just looked a bit closer at that photo. Not only is that box wine, but it's screwtop box wine. Huzzah.

Edited July 26, 2012 by Panaderia Canadiense (log)

[nickrey]

It's nice to see a company going back to a closure that has a 2.5 to 6% failure rate or higher.

[Lisa Shock]

When I managed a wine bar we had a weekly return system for bad bottles. We'd return 20+ bottles every week for credit. They were always ones with corks, I only ever returned one screwtop bottle ever -and it had a fault in the glass bottle not the cap. Some cork-sealed wines were so bad that 25% of the bottles were corked. Oh, and, once a case of cork-sealed bottles all suffering from high ethyl acetate.

[Paul Bacino]

Might be me.. but Assie wines !! Tend to be fruit driven.. maybe this type of close.. isn't allowing the balance of aging/ and ..or oxidation in their wines?

[nickrey]

I've been reading more about this issue since this topic was started and it seems that it is not a new one. Yes, there are some reductive properties under aged screwcap wine (slight sulphurous, burnt match, flavours). These are not present in wines that are capped using cork as a closure.

The cork proponents seem to jump on this as a reason to stick with cork (Ha! See we told you all along).

But, wait a minute. Cork still has a huge failure rate. It is so variable in performance that aged wines from the same case, stored next to each other in the same conditions, can be poles apart in taste.

So we have a closure that is traditional and has huge flaws.

Then we have a closure that is "modern" and has one, small, identifiable flaw.

Were I not committed to tradition, I'd definitely choose the one that is close to perfect over the one that is further away. Thus, screwcap wins on the evidence provided. Were I to buy cork and suffer from the extreme variability, I'd be entitled to feel ripped off by producers trying to sell me produce that is sealed with a defective material.

However, in countries that are tradition bound, I'd expect a lot more justification for not using screwcaps because they have some reductive properties. It appears that if a cork replacement is not perfect in every way, it cannot be seen as a proper replacement for cork, despite cork being a significantly more inferior closure in terms of variability and spoilage.

Edited July 27, 2012 by nickrey (log)

[Edward J]

A lot of the local wineries are going screw cap here, as are many Aussie and Euro wines.

Then again, ther are a a lot of "artifical" corks being used too. Don't know what the success rate is with those.

Here is a bit of non-wine realated (But it is cork related) trivia for you:

When you mix ground cork with linseed (flax) oil and apply heat and pressure, what do you get?

Linoleum.....

[mkayahara]

I'm not tremendously familiar with the chemistry of reduction in wine, but if it's truly reduction, can it just be solved through exposure to oxygen... i.e., decanting?

[tim]

It seems to me that cork producers should be testing for chlorine compounds in their raw materials. They should also be using peroxide to clean corks.

Then there's that latex paint problem....

[Don Giovanni]

ok ... so the bees nest was shaken ...

cork has come a very long way... the failure rate is falling, just how much ? I really don't know ...any failure is one too many no matter what the closure is... I use a composite where the cork is broken up and treated and put back together ... after over 10 years we have had less than 5 cork failures and the wines are aging wonderfully out of 500,000 ... the type is called DIAM...

I really don't know what is the best is ,but wine and cork have a very long relationship that we measure storage and quality of wine for centuries and I really don't think that will ever change...