CORK VERSUS SCREW CAP " THE BIG DEBATE!!"

CORKING WINES DATES BACK TO THE 18TH CENTURY!!

As long as I've been drinking wine it was always assumed that you needed a corkscrew to open that wonderful elixir, right?? Well not anymore, as time will tell the not so new screw top has made huge in roads in the wine industry all over the world! I for one was a real snob about this when I first noticed the caps and immediately felt cheated if a proper wine didn't have a cork….Surprise, some of my favorite wines today are twist off and these are not cheap wines! So many of the top Sauvignon Blancs producers are fans, especially when a wine is meant to be be consumed within a few years…The other varietal that makes great use of the screw cap is the famous GMS blends, Grenache, Mouvedre and Syrah these being some of my favorites..lighter than a Cab but smooth and full bodied and very fruit forward, some of the best examples coming out of Paso Robles and Santa Barbara County! Yum….

PASO ROBLES WINERIES ARE BIG FANS OF THE SCREW CAP!!

ANDREW MURRAY USES PREDOMINATELY SCREW CAPS ON THEIR WONDERFUL VARIETALS!

                     

LOVE THIS SAUVIGNON BLANC COMPLETE WITH SCREW CAP!!

Your sommelier ceremoniously pulls the cork on your bottle of wine. The aromas of violets or plums should fill the air, but you smell the unmistakable funky reek of mold. It is another “corked” wine! Is there a solution to this all-too-common problem!! Some compare the smell to wet pooch or sweaty gym socks….Yuk!

It is generally agreed that 3 to 5 percent of all bottles with natural corks show some degree of spoilage. The culprit is trichloroanisole, commonly known as TCA. This complex chemical comes from reactions within corks, which involve natural molds and the chlorine bleach used in cork manufacture.

For the last decade or so, there have been plenty of cork substitutes on the market. Some wineries have converted their entire production to synthetic corks. So, the problem is solved, right? Unfortunately, it is not quite that easy.

New technologies have greatly improved synthetic corks. But there are still problems with other synthetic corks, especially the plastic ones. They're hard to pull, and if you like to re-cork a bottle and put it back in the fridge, they are even harder to get back into the neck. Even good corkscrews have problems punching through the denser plastics, and using a two-pronged Ah-So is virtually impossible. If you consider it, the only reason to use a substitute cork is to preserve the ritual of pulling a stopper out of the wine bottle. Is the act of removing a cork such an essential part of the wine-drinking experience?

SCREW VERSUS CORK THE "BIG DEBATE"

IN NEED OF A "CORKSCREW"???

TRADITION VERSUS TECHNOLOGY!

The very best closure for wine has been around for years. It is easy to use, requires no tools, is airtight and easily resealable. What is this magical device? The screw cap, of course. “But wait!” you are saying. “Doesn't the slow passage of oxygen through a porous stopper help wines age and develop bottle bouquet?” That myth has been debunked. In fact, the screw cap makes the perfect wine closure—no taint, no oxidation, no problem. After all, if screw caps are good enough for $200 bottles of Scotch, why not for $20 bottles of wine?

The adventuresome New Zealand wine industry was the first to adopt screw caps en masse. Many of Australia's producers are in, too. Market-conscious American wineries are still testing the treacherous waters of public opinion on the subject, bottling part of their lineup in screw cap, just to see. The high-end Napa Valley winery Plumpjack put half its $150 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 in screw cap and found that this version sold out first. A few major American producers, including Pepi, Bonny Doon, and Hogue, have taken the plunge. Europeans are proving less receptive, but Gunderloch, in Germany, and Bordeaux's venerable André Lurton, are leading proponents for this closure.our sommelier ceremoniously pulls the cork on your bottle of wine.

The biggest producers of cork in the world is Corticeira Amorim in Portugal and they have felt the pinch of the falling cork market! Now there's an even more inventive 'breathable"screw cap called VinPerfect, these caps allow precise amounts of oxygen through a wine's aging process…what's a real cork to do??? As one writer put it '" at the end of the day, the cork industry is the horse versus the car!" So no matter how you pick your wines now and in the future, the wine industry is watching!! Consumers make the next thing and I predict that the screw cap and variations will make up for 40% of the closures by 2020….screw cap snobbery will be a thing of the past and it won't matter if you forgot your corkscrew or not….Cheers!! Keep on drinking great wine….Salute,
                                                                                                 THE WINE CONTESSA

WINE CONTESSA CELEBRATING WITH GREAT WINE & FRIENDS!