This article explores the ongoing debate between cork and screwcap stoppers for wine bottles, examining their aesthetic appeal, sustainability, and impact on wine quality.
Which wine-bottle stopper is preferable, cork or screwcap? On aesthetic grounds, cork must win every time. And on grounds of sustainability, a cork forest with its renewable ecosystem is more attractive than aluminium mining (although we still don't have an impartial comparative lifecycle analysis of the various wine-bottle closures).
But which is better for wine quality? Australians and New Zealanders, fed up with the performance of corks from Portugal around the turn of the century, moved almost wholesale to screwcaps, or Stelvins. The widely accepted view in academic wine circles is that screwcaps eliminate variation in natural corks and allow winemakers to be sure that the wine the consumer encounters is exactly the same as what was originally put in the bottle. Winemakers' chief concern is not the obvious mouldy cardboard stink of serious TCA infection but low-level cork taint that the consumer may not notice, but which robs the wine of its fruit and charm. It is hardly surprising then that when Stephen Browett, chair of fine wine traders Farr Vintners, invited various wine professionals to a blind tasting of exactly the same wine stoppered by cork and screwcap, he had a 100% acceptance rate. Very few producers have examples of each closure over several vintages — or admit to it. (It is rumoured that the Bordeaux first growths have been experimenting with screwcaps for some time.) Most producers decide to use just one type of stopper. But Farr has been buying the New Zealand wines of Kumeu River for years, and Browett was able to source examples of some of its early-21st-century bottlings under both cork and screwcap, two 2002 whites and a 2000 red, while it was making the transition to screwcap after encountering severe TCA in one cork-stoppered 1999 wine
WINES CORK SCREWCAPS WINE STOPPERS WINE QUALITY
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