Pull the Cork!

by Fred Konopaki

Imagine that you've just purchased a shiny new PDA, unwrapped it and tried to get it to work only to realize that it's defective. You take it back to the retailer and exchange it for a new one which works perfectly. Fine; you're happy with that. The retailer in turn sends it back to the manufacturer along with the other defective PDA's they have under the counter. And the manufacturer gets boxes of them every year; in fact almost seven percent of their products are faulty resulting in millions of dollars of lost revenue. Do you think they would let this go on? Well, wine makers have been allowing this to happen for years and you, unwittingly, are the victim...and the cause!

The source of most defects in wine is cork taint and it costs the wine industry over ten billion dollars a year. Recent estimates by wineries indicate that anywhere between three and ten percent of wine bottled with a cork stopper is defective. The culprit is a chemical compound called TCA or 2,4,6-trichloroanisole. Sounds scary huh? Not really. Have you ever put your nose to a glass of wine and noticed it smelled a little "off", kind of like wet cardboard, mold or maybe your Golden Retriever after a bath? That's cork taint and most people don't even know it's there. It's caused by a reaction between mold and chemicals: mold present in raw cork bark, oak for wine barrels, barrel racking, winery walls etc., and chlorine which is used as a disinfectant in wineries. The human perception of this chemical is about five part per trillion, but even imperceptible amounts can suppress the wonderful aromas and fruit characteristics in a wine. In all likelihood most of us have had more than a few bottles like this but, not knowing the cause, simply chalked it up to a bad wine that we'd never try again.

Cork has been used as a stopper for over three thousand years but it wasn't until the 1600's when a young monk named Dom Perignon (you've heard of this guy) started using corks in the bottling of his champagne. Corks really came into their own in the 1700's when the first production facility was opened in Spain. Natural cork, however, is an ancient technology that has had it's time; it's like using smoke signals instead of your Blackberry.

The not-so-new kid on the block is the screwcap or Stelvin closure as it's known in the wine industry. The basic screwcap was patented in England in 1889 and the Stelvin brand was introduced in the 50's by French manufacturer La Bouchage Mecanique. As a wine closure Stelvin really made a name for itself in Switzerland during the 1970's and by 1995 the Swiss were using sixty million of them a year. Screwcaps are now so popular that there is a backlog of five months just for production; or at least they are in some parts of the world.

In North America and the old-world wine making countries of Europe it is consumers, not the wineries who are their own worst enemy. Reluctance to adopt this new technology can be linked directly to consumers’ romantic fantasies about cork: screwcaps don't allow the wine to age, screwcaps make the wine look cheap, pulling a cork is sexy, etc. But the truth is this: the Stelvin closure always works, corks do not. Yalumba in Australia experimented with the screwcap in 1976 but chose to abandon the project in 1984 only to revive the screwcap again in 2000. (In fact, most Aussie winemakers have been bottling wine for their own consumption with screwcaps for years!) Chateau Haut Brion, one of the world's greatest wine producers, bottled a portion of the 1971 vintage with screwcaps and found, seven years later, no difference between those bottles and others closed with cork (except for cork taint in some bottles of course) but also chose to abandon the screwcap. In both instances it was consumer pressure that won out.

Recently, however, the rest of the world has begun to see the light. In New Zealand, long a leader in the use of screwcap closures, wines bottled under Stelvin outsell those stopped with cork. In fact, usage of screwcaps there has gone from one bottle in a hundred in 2000 to seven out of ten bottles today, due in large part to consumer acceptance. The movement has reached Canada as well; Tinhorn Creek began using Stelvin in 2003 on some higher-end reserve bottles and the VQA (Vintners Quality Alliance of Canada) has officially approved of their use for all wines in this country.

So the next time you’re picking up a bottle of wine for that dinner party or barbeque put your biases aside and grab the bottle with the screwtop; you know it will be perfect. Besides, what if your host doesn’t have a corkscrew?