Cork vs Screwcap

Cork or Screwcap? The jury is still out. In fact, there is unlikely to be any one wine closure leading the market in the foreseeable future.

Cork vs Screwcap
Let’s be honest… we all love the romance of a wine cork. The flair involved, the fantastic array of different corkscrews you can use… and of course that satisfying ‘pop’. You can’t get any of that with a screwcap wine… it feels more like opening a bottle of soft drink. And all the best wines are sealed with cork… aren’t they?

Cork Taint
In fact they are not, with a growing legion of winemakers moving away from cork due to ongoing problems with cork taint. Cork taint is the most common cause of wine contamination. It is caused by a chemical called TCA (technically 2,4,6-trichloranisole) which is frequently found in corks after the manufacturing process. A wine that is spoiled by cork taint will smell musty. People might say it smells like ‘sweaty socks’, ‘wet cardboard’, ‘wet hessian’ or ‘grandma’s basement’.

You will read various estimates of the amount of wine that is affected by cork taint. A fairly well accepted figure is that 6% of all wines sealed with cork are affected by cork taint (that is, around 2 bottles from every 3 cases)! Some feel that it may be even higher than this if you include wine that is merely affected by the cork taint (this may smell less fresh, flat or lacking intensity of fruit) as well as those that are totally spoiled.

It’s hard to fully assess the amount of cork tainted wine because the untrained nose may not pick up cork taint. If you think of how much wine you’ve imbibed over the years, it’s unlikely you’ve sent 6% back (or tipped it down the sink). Most of us just think the wine isn’t very nice, or isn’t to our taste… and we don’t buy it again.

So it’s no wonder the winemakers want to move away from cork. Cork taint costs a fortune in returned wines, but even worse, the damage to a winery or winemaker’s reputation and future sales from ‘awful’ wines that are actually cork affected can be huge.

Synthetic cork
A lot of people ask us ‘what about those plastic corks?’ Our answer is ‘if you have any in your cellar or wine rack, drink it quickly’! Plastic corks were quickly found to be an imperfect seal which led to random oxidation – that is, lots of wine that was sealed with a synthetic cork aged (or oxidised) far too quickly. So it is really only useful for a wine that is intended to be consumed in the very short term.

So what about Screwcaps?
For a while it looked like all it would take for screwcaps to completely corner the market in wine closures was to gain public acceptance… for the logic of the argument against cork taint to outweigh the ‘romance’ of the cork.
Unfortunately, a different set of problems seems to affect wines sealed with a screwcap. Studies have shown that oxidation, reduction, bacteriological contamination and volatile acidity faults can often be found in screwcapped wines.

What are the alternatives?
Zork (launched in August 04) is a hybrid design combining the screwcap’s ease of opening with the familiar ‘pop’. It comprises a plunger, which creates the ‘pop’ and can be used to reseal the bottle after use; a filter, which can be customised to either halt or facilitate oxygen transference; and a tamper evident cap, which fits over a standard bottle (rather than needing to have a standard size, screw-top neck) and is more shock-resistant than the thin walled screwcap.

It seems to have been designed to overcome all the present issues with cork and screwcap, but having just been released, has not yet been tested in the marketplace or via long-term studies (and it is these studies that have shown the problems with screwcap).
Meanwhile the cork industry is fighting back.

Procork have released a cork with a condom-like device over both ends of the cork. This is a multi-layered, perforated membrane which claims to block TCA while still allowing the wine to seep into the cork to keep it moist. The company is currently ramping up to produce commercial quantities after promising test results.

Cork supplier Sabaté has introduced a new cork processing method (Diamond) to attempt to eliminate TCA, which is also producing promising results.

Confused?
To be honest, so are we! While the jury is still out we will continue to rely on the winemakers to determine the best closure for their wine. The best thing we can do is learn to recognise the key faults, and remember that any faulty bottle of wine can be returned to its point of sale. If you’ve ordered wine in a restaurant, don’t let a waiter tell you that a screwcapped wine can’t be faulty… it can. And naturally, if you find any wine you've purchased via Wine Plus is faulty, you can always return it via us to the supplier.

How do I recognise wine faults?
You need to train your nose to recognise them… which means you need to know what they smell like!
Part of the wine education at a Wine Plus party is to show you some of these aroma faults.