A question I am asked over and over again in the Shop is, “The difference between cork and screw caps”. Most people seem to associate cork with expensive/medium range wine and screw caps with cheap wine, this may have been true in the past, but today some of the best vineyards are bottling their wines with screw caps.

In the last couple of centuries our wine industry has have been bottling more wine, which leads to more cork, which leads to more harvesting of trees that are approximately 6 to 9 years old, and our trees have not managed to keep up with the demand, this has led to a much higher use of pesticides and wood preservatives to get the cork ready sooner. These treatments on the trees are what most people are pointing at to account for the large increase in corked wine.
Corked wine is basically wine that smells and tastes undesirable and the main cause is bad corks. The way this happens is that chemicals that can be found in the cork react negatively with the wine and cause the wine to smell and taste bad. If you look at the percentage of wine that is corked you will see the figures sometimes go up to 10%. That is high.
Screw caps on the other hand have an almost 0 fail rate, they can also be recycled easily.

By the way if you are wondering about plastic corks, that came out a few years ago? They are not that great as they are not a memory material so you can not age wine with plastic, and it can still react negatively with the wine due to the chemicals in the plastic. They are not very organic or eco-friendly. Wine tasters complain of ‘plastic taint’.

There are quite a few wine makers that believe that screw caps are the best closure currently available, alternatives to cork available. Ok so the market say lets go, so why not just order up those caps and bottling machines and get to work? The main argument is over the issue of aging. The cork has a wonderful ability to let the wine breathe. No one knows how screw caps will react to long periods of aging.

The oldest wine that I could get information on which has been sealed with a cap, dates back to 1998 Plumpjack Reserve red in the USA. There are cork sealed and cap sealed. They did a blind tasting 2008 and the results were mixed. For the moment, the logical thinking would be that for short-term consumption screw caps are just fine, while for aging, cork is it.
Time will tell, as for us the general consumer, screw caps are just fine, no bottle openers needed, perfect for a pick-nick.

Happy dinking
By Nikki Schaafsma-Harris
Oak Barrel Wine Boutique