Saying Goodbye To Wine Corks
More and more wines are featuring cork alternatives. Screw-cap wines have been around for some time, but only recently have many high-end wines featured this cork alternative.
Now, wine lovers are discovering that screw cap wines are definitely worth checking out.
Joshua Wesson, the co-founder of "Best Cellars" retail wine chain and a wine critic, discusses this on a visit to the The Early Show.
According to Wesson, part of the big drive for seeking cork alternatives is a shortage of cork. Cork is from the bark of trees that grow only in Portugal and experiments to grow them elsewhere or in green houses have not worked. Meanwhile, Wesson notes, the demand for cork has skyrocketed because more countries, such as Israel and Chile, are now producing great wines.
Another reason driving the need for cork alternatives is that cork, as much as it has been part of the wine culture for hundreds of years, is not foolproof. "Corked" wines occur frequently at a rate that would not be tolerated by any other industry, Wesson says. So while the process of producing fine wines has been greatly modernized, the cork has remained the same.
According to wineloverspage.com, corks have been the traditional wine-bottle closure for about 300 years. When they work well, they make about as good a stopper as anyone has invented. The cork is so enshrined in tradition that most of us chuckle at the very idea of a quality wine closed with a beer cap or jug-wine cap. But the wine industry isn't laughing.
Here's why:
Natural cork is all too often afflicted by a fungus called 2,4,6-tricloroanisole (TCA), a chemical that imparts its flavor to wine and, basically, ruins it. If you've ever tasted a wine with a dank, moldy aroma that reminds you of wet cardboard, a damp basement or mushrooms, that's TCA, and the wine is said to be "corked." By some estimates, as many as one bottle in 20 is tainted by the TCA fungus. Some wineries have reduced the incidence of corkiness by using expensive corks that undergo intense inspection before use. Even then, however, some afflicted corks get through.
As recently as 10 years ago, estimates of the percentage of corked wines on the commercial market have ranged from 5 to 10 percent. According to wineloverspage.com, in the early 1990s the entire cork industry - including growers, factories, suppliers, and quality control alliances such as the Natural Cork Quality Council and the European Cork Federation - began to take a good, hard look at improving the processing, shipping, and testing of their product in order to minimize TCA. Most industry observers say that the measures have been so effective that in recent years the incidence of corked wines has been reduced to 2-4 percent.
But there is still a growing movement for cork alternatives. New Zealand and Australian producers really started this movement; now other wine producers are catching on - even the traditional French wineries.
According to wineloverspage.com and "Decanter" magazine, industry usage of synthetic stoppers is now said to be between 5 and 8 percent of the market. Information on the effectiveness of synthetics in comparison to natural corks is still scant, and sometimes conflicting. According to Wesson, the synthetics are not perfect because some allow more oxygen in than traditional cork (causing less than acceptable oxidation) and others were more difficult to remove from the bottle than cork. Some wine critics believe also that synthetics can impart an off-taste to the wine.
Tests, while not entirely conclusive, strongly suggest that the lowly screw cap may work better than any other closure - including natural cork - to keep wine fresh and protect it from oxidation and "browning."
Metacork is a new technology that combines traditional cork with screw caps. The makers refer to this as a "twist-capsule." The unique bottle design has a built-in cork anchor that allows you to remove a cork or synthetic stopper with nothing more than a few twists of the capsule. You can find out more at gardnertechnologies.com.