Cork versus screw caps for wine bottles: the debate rages on
While there is an undeniable romance to opening a bottle of wine sealed with natural cork, more and more wineries around the world are switching to screw caps or plastic corks due to cost concerns and the now-infamous problem of cork taint. As demand for cork subsides, the cork industry is engaging in some heavy PR to get everyone buying its stuff again.
I Love Natural Cork, a new and not-so-subtly-named campaign from the U.K., is playing the Al Gore card: not only is cork the superior wine closure, but the harvesting of cork is a green, sustainable practice that supports ancient ecosystems. Apparently it’s a renewable and recyclable product.
But other sources estimate that cork taint—where a bottle is spoiled by contaminants within the cork—sits at an unacceptable five per cent. That’s one in 20 bottles ruined by natural cork, which doesn’t sound sustainable at all. Toronto sommelier Zoltan Szabo likens it to a car or TV set that’s defective from the get-go.
Not all wine experts are convinced that natural cork is the best way to seal wine. Szabo, for one, calls screw caps “slick and practical, perfect especially for young, fresh-style wines.” Tony Aspler, a Toronto sommelier and author of Tony Aspler’s Cellar Book, tells us that most wine should be sealed with a screw cap due to the hermetic seal it provides. “Ninety per cent of wines made around the world today are for consumption within a year of their vintage date,” he says. “These wines should be under screw cap.” However, he adds that wines that will be cellared for five years or more should have cork closures, as cork contains microscopic air pockets that feed oxygen to the wine, helping the maturation process.
Still, while I Love Natural Cork apparently has the backing of the illustrious Prince Charles, Aspler isn’t betting on the continued dominance of cork. “I would not invest in shares of a company that produces corkscrews,” he says.
We’ve already called our portfolio manager.
• Campaign promotes wine corks over screw caps [Toronto Sun]
(Image: Rennett Stowe)
With all due respect to Jon Sufrin and his broker, readers might want to consider hard evidence about wine taint from multiple sources instead of the lone wine blogger cited in this story.
As Christian Butzke, Ph.D., Associate Professor Food Science
at Purdue University, said last year, “TCA (cork taint) is no longer a major problem for the U.S. wine industry.”
His statement is backed up ny numerous studies, including the following.
• In 1999, before the introduction of numerous improvements to cork manufacturing, wine chemist John Casey estimated the likely incidence of TCA at below 2 percent of all wines made in Australia. Casey based his analysis on results of tests in 19 studies of over 35,000 wine samples. (John Casey, ‘Taint necessarily so’, Aust. Wine Industry Journal, Nov-Dec 1999, Vol 14 No 6, 49-5 ; link, if possible)6)
• In 2002, the UK Wine and Spirit Association’s investigation into the incidence of musty taints in wines sold in the UK estimated the incidence of mustiness at between 0.7 and 1.2 percent. The analysis was conducted by the independent research institute, Campden and Chorleywood Food Research Association in association with leading UK wine retailers. More than 13,700 samples were tested.
• In a trial by Southcorp in Australia involving 150,000 corks over nine years, the overall incidence of different types of cork taint was just 1.84 percent. Of
this, 1.5 percent was due to TCA. (Simpson, RF, DL Capone, BC Duncan and MA Sefton, ‘Incidence and nature of “fungal must” taint in winecorks’, Aust. & NZ Wine Industry Journal, Jan-Feb 2005; link, if possible)
• Christian Butzke, Ph.D., one of the leading wine experts in the U.S. and a vocal critic of cork taint, found cork taint to occur at levels at or below 1%. (May/June 2009 edition of Vineyard & Winery Management)
• In a test of 500 bottles of wine, some of which included older vintages that would presumably have a higher incidence of TCA contamination, the French Wine Society found that four – or 0.8 percent – bottles were affected by TCA. The Society declared TCA a “non-issue.” (http://www.frenchwinesociety.org/site.php?page=fwsa&id=25, December 2009)
But when wine fails to meet expectations, the cork gets blamed, even though there is a long list of other chemicals, bacteria and mold that can spoil wine.
Case in point: A recent study of 3,000 wine drinkers found that one in 20 complained that their wine was “corked” when in fact it had come from a bottle with a screw-cap.
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/7987191/Wine-words-baffle-us-survey-says.html)
Cheers,
Lance Ignon
http://www.100PercentCork.Org
http://www.facebook.com/100PercentCork?v=wall
The “one in twenty bottles ruined by cork taint” is highly exaggerated PR hysteria crafted by alternative closure manufacturers who wish to sell more of their product and factory wineries who can save a lot of money by shaving a few cents per bottle off the cost of using corks. What better way to propogate the sale of screwcaps than by scaring the public into thinking that something is fundamentally wrong with cork?
The fact is, out of several thousand bottles of wine that I’ve enjoyed in the past two decades, only a handful have been a victim of taint. The cork removal ritual is an essential part of the wine consumption experience and is a tradition that will be destroyed if people continue to buy wines with a chunk of plastic in their bottles. Consequently, no matter how good the wine is, I won’t buy it if it has a screw cap.
And for those who think “a handful” of bad corks is too much out of 1000’s of bottles, then that problem can be completely eliminated if producers were to use the newish DIAM cork which is taint free, made of cork, and comes in different densities so producers can select the version which allows the correct amount of oxygen through for aging of their particular wine.
This past week I read a heart-wrenching story about a community in Italy where the traditional knowledge and skills in harvesting cork are being lost due to the switch to screw caps. I hope people will take Mr. Swan’s advice and look at more alternatives before the conversion to a “twist off” becomes standard. These artisans add to the magic in every bottle of vino. For more information, the World Wildlife Fund has a campaign to preserve the cork industry and this unique way of life. http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/where_we_work/mediterranean/about/projects/?uProjectID=9E0722