A Death Knell for the Cork?
For many wine drinkers, a bottle of wine simply must have a cork. Anything else is sacrilegious. Many enjoy the pageantry of hearing the cork pop out of the beautifully labeled bottle before the fragrant liquid flows into the polished glass. The sound of a tin cap being unscrewed can be enough to swiftly kill the evening's elegance.
However, with tainted corks ruining so many wines — disappointing consumers and costing winemakers millions in the process — many in the wine business scrambled to find alternative closures. To ease the transition away from the natural cork, synthetic corks were devised, but screwcaps were not far behind.
Synthetic Corks
Synthetic, or plastic, corks did little to appease cork traditionalists in the early days. Yes, wine lovers still heard the pop, but the early synthetics were difficult to remove and reinsert, and they permitted too much air to enter the bottle. They did have more aesthetic appeal, coming in red, purple, yellow, and black colors.
Today, the best synthetic corks do not have the flaws of their older siblings. Many are encased in a plastic sleeve that eases their removal from a bottle. This is all well and good, but several synthetic cork producers uses phrases such as “oxygen management” in marketing their wares, a sign that you should not consider long-term aging of bottles with synthetic closures.
Get out your “church-key” for these drink-me-now sparklers. Unlike other sparkling wines that keep the bubbles locked up with corks, Il Prosecco and Il Moscato from Mionetto Wines are topped with a crown cap. They're lightly sparking — frizzante, in Italian — and low in alcohol. And they're meant to be drunk right away.
Anatomy of a Screwcap
Screwcaps have been a tough sell in the United States, because many of the low quality jug wines emerging from California after Prohibition had screwcaps on them. Countries such as Australia and New Zealand lacked this cultural baggage, and given their malcontent with wine flaws stemming from the cork they were quicker to embrace this closure. Screwcaps are often referred to as the Stelvin closure, a shortened version of Stelcap-vin, the name used by a French company who began releasing them for use in 1959.
Outside the United States, buying boxed wine is not a big deal. In Sweden, 65 percent of wines sold are in the box format, In Australia, the figure is 52 percent. And in Norway, boxed wines make up 40 percent of all wines sold.
Not all screwcaps are created equal, which is good news for those believing that a bottle needs to breathe for the wine inside it to evolve.
Screwcap manufacturers have the option of including a polyethylene liner underneath the aluminum alloy cap, and this liner drastically slows, if not stops, the amount of air seeping into the bottle. Many screwcapped white wines have this feature, which preserves freshness. Absent the liner, the screwcap is little different than the natural cork, except that TCA contamination is not possible. Screwcaps also cost less than the highest quality natural corks.
