If you're buying wines under $15 to drink now, you should rejoice when they have screwcaps or synthetic corks.
Moreover, you should let everyone know that's what you want: your wine shop, the wineries you patronize, wine importers, the wine media. In Australia, where people drink lots of great wine, screwcaps are widespread. The only reason they aren't common here is because the industry thinks consumers don't want them.
But you should.
Here's why: Natural cork always carries a risk of ruining your wine with TCA, a compound that can at best suppress the natural freshness of the flavor, and at worst can make your wine taste like moldy wet newspapers. You don't have that risk with synthetic corks or screwcaps.
Instead, with non-cork closures, you risk that the wine will not age gracefully. What makes corks so great is that they allow the tiniest bit of oxygen, microscopic amounts, that allow the wine to develop mature, complex flavors.
Synthetic corks and screwcaps are new enough -- and the technology is changing quickly enough -- that we don't know how well they will perform over 20 years.
But if you're going to drink the bottle this year, why do you care?
With its future at stake, the cork industry is spending a fair amount of money researching the problem. And it is making an impact. There are no accurate figures for percentage of cork tainted bottles, but some who have tried to calculate how many cork tainted bottles are found at wine competitions estimate a figure of just under 5%. Even a decade ago, the number would have been closer to 7% -- that's a significant improvement.
But it's not 0%. Wines sent to competitions should be the very best bottles a winery has. I've never been to a competition where none of the bottles were corked.
Cork advocates will point out that some screwcaps are so effective at preventing oxygen from entering that they occasionally trap sulfides in the wine, giving the wine a "reduced," sulphuric aroma upon opening. But this goes away with exposure to air, whereas cork taint just keeps getting worse.
In sum: if you're buying $100 wines to drink in 2019 or later, corks are still the way to go, despite the risk. But if you're buying $15 wines to drink now, it's time to change.
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3 comments:
Most wines these days (especially in CA) - even those closed with a natural cork - are not really built to last more than a couple of years. The cork is there to satisfy consumer expectations of a particular type of closure. This is something Diam, Stelvin and various synthetic closure producers will have to overcome.
Many winemakers will say they use synthetic/screwcap closures for ready-to-market/ready-to-drink wines.
I checked with a friend and here is the rundown on closures:
>Stelvin: ~1 cent/bottle but the cost of the machinery to run the bottling is prohibitive to many smaller producers.
>Synthetic closures: ~15 cents/bottle.
>Diam: ~15-20 cents/bottle.
>Natural Cork: upwards of $1.10 to $1.25 per bottle.
If wines are not made to last more than a few years, synthetic and Diam appear to be the way to go if you want to reduce the retail price per bottle.
Thank you for the very interesting comment, Redwinebuzz.
One thing I must add is that the price of corks varies a great deal. The more intense the quality control of the cork company, the more the corks cost. There are corks available much cheaper than the price you cite.
A few years ago I went to a tasting of wines from an emerging country that I won't embarrass here. I've never tasted so many corked wines -- about 30%. We all assumed it's because producers are skimping on the quality of corks. Don't do that!
You are absolutely right about the cork prices.
For argument's sake I gave the top prices.
Insofar as the cost of closures (and the system/machinery required to use them in bottling) affects the price per bottle, it makes sense to use synthetic closures for ready-to-drink value wines. But like with corks, there are better and worse closures - some with troubling inconsistency of O2 ingression which also results in flaws and inconsistency of wine quality.
Again, consumer expectations and education play a significant role.
As I said befo
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