Flavors Flavors (July 09, 2004)

Screw-cap wines

By Robert Rich

Most wine lovers learn to fear the smell of a bad cork. The wine exudes fragrances of swimming pools and wet cardboard, as its fruit profile gets buried.

About 10 percent of wines get cork damage, traceable to a fungus native to the cork oak. Fungus spores often survive cork-makers' attempts to sanitize the soft tree bark. In the cork, the invisible fungus slowly bonds chlorine into off-smelling trichloroanisole (TCA).

For the last several years, Santa Cruz wine entrepreneur Randall Grahm has been waging a marketing war to help eradicate corked wines. President of Bonny Doon Winery, Grahm switched to screw caps on his flagship Cigare Volante Rhone-style blend. Bonny Doon's rustic Ca'del Solo "Big House Red" sells for under $10 at most markets, and pairs well with barbecue or pasta.

Many wineries in Australia and New Zealand have also started bottling their table wines with screw tops, as have some top California wineries including Sonoma-Cutrer.

But there is still a bias against screw tops. Most buyers still associate them with cheap jug wine; many relish the ritual of the corkscrew; and experts question whether fine wines will age as elegantly without the minute respiration that a cork provides.

Screw-cap proponents argue that the air needed for maturation already enters the bottle during bottling. Blind tastings show little difference, but only time will tell. Most top wineries remain conservative and will stay with cork for a while.

Cork makers in Portugal meanwhile try to improve their sanitation methods by pasteurizing cork under pressure at higher temperatures. Synthetic corks have also gained acceptance. With this multi-pronged effort, hopefully we can soon forget the taint of bad cork in good wine.

E-mail Robert Rich at flavors@rrich.com

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