You buy a bottle of wine, take it home and get ready to pull the cork. What ends up on your corkscrew these days, though, is often a bright orange, purple-red or tan plastic cylinder, not a cork at all. And if industry trends spread, you may soon find yourself twisting off a screw cap, even if the bottle was an expensive one.
More wineries are looking into alternatives to cork for sealing their bottles. That is because real cork can harbor TCA, or 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, a compound that imparts a moldy smell to wine. TCA develops from an interaction among mold spores, chlorine and plant compounds called phenols.
It can crop up anywhere along the cork production line, from the forest (corks are stamped from the bark of a species of oak) to the storage room. TCA contamination can come from oak barrels or winery lumber, too, but most cases are attributable to tainted corks.
A “corked” or “corky” wine will smell like wet cardboard, a moist dishrag or musty cellar. One of the difficulties in eradicating the problem is that the human nose is very sensitive to TCA: It doesn’t take much of it to make a wine stink.
This problem turns up in corks and wines of all prices and pedigrees. Some wineries say 10 percent of their products are affected; the accepted industry average is around 4 percent. That’s still a lot of wine thrown away (and sales lost) on account of rotten stoppers.
Plastic solution
Enter the synthetic cork. Versions ranging from adequate to very good have been around for more than a decade. A leading supplier is Supreme Corq in Kent, Wash., just outside of Seattle. Developed in 1992 by Dennis Burns, a designer of hockey helmets and sunglasses, the Supreme Corq came on the market in 1994.
Burns had noticed during a cellar tour in California that the barrels were closed with plastic bungs. When he asked the cellar master why he used plastic, he was told, “So we have no risk of contamination.” What was good for barrels, Burns reasoned, should be good for bottles.
The product is made from the same material used to produce baby bottle nipples, allowing it to “expand, contract and rebound,” according to Supreme Corq marketing director Joyce Steers.
These synthetic corks have no risk of TCA contamination, though critics say they can be hard to pull and that they can trap “off” flavors. As to its advantages, “it lets the winery bring a more consistent bottle of wine to the marketplace,” Steers said. More than 1,000 wineries in the United States, Chile, Italy and Argentina are using this closure.
One of the estates in California to do so is St. Francis Winery in Sonoma County. The winery has been using synthetic corks for 12 years; it switched to Supreme Corq as soon as it came on the market.
At first, the winery only bottled white wines with synthetic corks, Marketing Director Nan Fontaine said, but within 8 years, every wine was sealed with synthetics. These days, even its reserve red wines, costing $35 to $45 per bottle, have synthetic corks.
Most other wineries have been conservative in their approach, always leery of consumer reaction. Many winemakers still bottle only their moderately priced wines with synthetic corks. The public, they reason, still looks on real cork as synonymous with great wine.
Although it is unlikely that the most renowned Bordeaux will ever switch from real cork, more producers, unwilling to accept tainted wines in today’s marketplace, are making the switch to man-made corks.
Getting a synthetic cork out of the bottle can be a struggle, as the seal is very tight. Steers acknowledges that, but said that once the seal is broken, synthetics are actually easier to remove. She recommends using a traditional waiter’s corkscrew (the type with a long hollow helix, rather than a straight, augerlike screw) to extract synthetic corks; the “Ah-So” type with two metal prongs that fit down the sides of the cork usually doesn’t work.
There are no such problems with wines that use a screw cap, and you don’t have to worry about spoiling your picnic by leaving the corkscrew behind. But if screw tops sound like a cheap alternative to cork, think again.
“Screw caps are actually more expensive than using real cork,” said Erica Crawford, in Chicago on behalf of her husband, New Zealand winemaker Kim Crawford. Her husband’s winery is one of more than two dozen in the country to use screw caps. If the rest of the wine world wants to laugh at the Kiwis, so be it: They believe they are using the best method for protecting the wine.
Although they look like flimsy metal closures, screw caps are high technology. About three-quarters of an inch long, the caps are an aluminum alloy lined with polyethylene, which in turn is coated with polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC), a film much like a cling wrap. This forms an oxygen barrier that keeps the wine from oxidizing.
Types of screw tops
Two types of screw cap are used in New Zealand, an Australian model and the Stelvin, from France. It is the latter version Kim Crawford uses for his wines and the first few hundred cases of his chardonnay and pinot noir with screw caps have come into the domestic market.
The Crawfords started using synthetic corks 4 years ago after a batch of chardonnay was tainted by its real corks, but they since have become believers in screw caps. They bottled the same chardonnay with synthetic corks and screw caps. After six months, they became convinced that the screw cap chardonnay tasted fresher than that bottled with a synthetic cork.
Among the advantages of the screw cap, Erica Crawford emphasized, is the elimination of leakage and the ability of wines to age just as well standing up as in a horizontal position. But most important is the consistency.
A few wineries in California have started to use screw caps, most notably Plumpjack Winery in Napa Valley. After owner Gordon Getty tasted too many corked wines in his cellar, he vowed to find a way to eliminate this problem. The winery’s first venture into screw caps was the Stelvin, which went on the 1997 Plumpjack Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon (at $140 a bottle).
The winery bottled half of the wine with traditional corks and half with screw caps. General Manager John Conover reports that the wines are aging identically. The winery also bottled its 1998 reserve as well as half of the 600-case production of the 1999 reserve with the closure.
Sonoma Cutrer and Bonny Doon are two other wineries to use a screw cap; others are soon to follow. Plumpjack’s Conover is pleased with the look and the performance of the formerly scorned closure. “It’s actually become a viable alternative for wineries.”
