At our store, the first few months of every year are spent re-tasting wines we’ve had for a while, to see how they’re holding up and to refresh our memories on forgotten items.  To expediate this process, we often sample 30-50 bottles at a time, and, of course, someone has to open all those bottles.  That someone is usually me.  Though I consider myself an expert un-corker, popping so many at a time always makes me pray for more screwcaps!

The Stelvin screwcap closure has been around for decades, but only recently has it begun to gain consumer confidence.  Winemakers, on the other hand, often embrace alternate closures.  As Adam Lechmere (from Decanter magazine) says:  “There seems to be one irrefutable argument: if wine was invented today, glass would be the obvious choice to hold it, but it would never occur to anybody to seal the bottle with bark.”

To be honest, the biggest reason that I am so enamored with the screwcap is ease of opening.  Wines with traditional closures can sometimes be a pain.  Plastic corks are the worst offenders, especially the cheap, hard plastic corks; they’re difficult to pull out because friction causes them to almost adhere to the glass, and they’re impossible to put back in the bottle because they expand when removed.  They also have a tendency to break less-expensive corkscrews.   Natural corks can present a problem, particularly in older wines, when they dry out, become brittle and break off.  (I have been known, on occasion, to simply take a pen and jam a broken cork right into the bottle rather than wrestling it out!)  And with a screwcap, you don’t even need to worry about finding a corkscrew!

Screwcap vs. Cork: a look at color change over time for this Semillon

There are a few (more legitimate) advantages to the Stelvin closure Imagine this scenario: you’ve got a special bottle, perhaps a classified growth Bordeaux, or a cru Barolo, and you’ve been saving it for quite some time.  Tonight is finally the night to open it, so you prepare a terrific dinner, you invite some good friends over, you pop the cork, pour the wine, and– it tastes like wet newspaper!

After all that effort and anticipation, your wine is corked!

TCA, or cork taint, is hard to quantify.  Estimates put its occurence anywhere from 1% to 8% of bottles.  Exact numbers are difficult to come by as many consumers are unable to detect mild cork taint; for those inexperienced in tasting, a bottle may simply seem “off.”  But for comparisons sake, imagine if 1-8 out of every 100 cars that GM built failed to function properly- there would be mass panic!  Naturally, corked wines are a bit less serious, but it’s still no fun.

Another consideration that is often overlooked is the closures’ impact on bottle variation.  There are myriad reasons why a wine might change from one bottle to the next, but it rarely occurs to people to think about the cork.  Because natural cork is harvested, not produced, there are innate differences in porosity that can affect how much or how little air is let into the bottle, causing the wine to age unevenly.  Screwcaps, on the other hand, are produced identically, and therefore allow for a more consistent (albiet significantly reduced) permeation of oxygen.

In fairness, screwcaps are not perfect.  It is questionable whether their production has a higher carbon footprint when compared to natural cork, which is a renewable resource (although they are 100% recyclable!).  In addition, the reduced oxygen levels can sometimes lead to ‘reductive’ notes in a wine, characterized by the smell of rubber, or burnt matches.  And, of course, customers will always lament about the loss of the “romance” of uncorking a bottle.

But for me, personally, screwcaps are the way to go!

More info:

http://www.screwcapinitiative.com/normal.asp?navID=2&pageID=2

http://www.realcork.org/