The Great Cork Debate

Every time you turn around these days, someone seems to be ranting about corks in wine bottles. And when you open a wine bottle, it’s a toss up on what kind of cork will be there. Then you have to deal with it.

By Dianne Boate & Robert Meyer
Published: October, 2006

Real corks can break off halfway out, plastic corks won’t go back in and a screw top suddenly on view can create a new kind of bottle shock.

So is that bottle shock warranted? And is the cork the best way to seal the bottle?

The 17th century use of cork closures to seal glass bottles began a new chapter in winemaking skills, for it was found that a tightly sealed bottle helped to keep wine longer. It was also discovered the cork closures let wine breathe and age, which became important for red wines. According to the wine, the winemaker decides when to stop fermentation and bottle the wine. If it is a heavy red, the cork closure provides air—important for development of flavor. Other wines made for more immediate consumption, such as Beaujolais Nouveau and white wines, the breathing aspect of the cork is not so important, because the character of the wine is already established. But make no mistake, too much air and leakage can damage any bottle of wine. (If you see a white wine that you have been storing looking really yellow-gold, you are probably in trouble.)

But here’s the cork villain: an inherent chemical property called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), also called cork taint, is a volatile contaminant, which has caused a lot of good wine to go bad – specifically, three years ago, there was an upsurge in TCA.

This corked wine gave wineries a bad reputation and affected sales. Restaurants also suffer when patrons send back a corked bottle. Ah, all those bottom lines.

We asked some industry insiders and people who make their living in the world of wine what they thought about traditional cork-vs-plastic-vs-screwtop.

Ed Delmon has been in the alcoholic beverage business for 55 years said, Cork was the plastic of its time. If plastic had been invented then they would have used plastic. The future is screw caps.

Over 30 years of testing have shown a potential of better quality, consistency, longevity and less chemical/sensory changes. And, screw caps offer the winemaker a way out of the dilemma of oxidation of wine in a bottle. Wineries using bottles with corks can lose up to 10% of their production, and no matter how big or how small, 10% is a lot to lose, to say nothing of waste.

Agreement about screw caps was voiced by the owners of Blackwell’s Wines and Spirits in the Richmond District of San Francisco; Michael Denny, president of American Wine Distributors; Ron Hildebrand, graphics/wine label illustrator; Syndi Seid, creator of Advanced Etiquette, who teaches how to open bottles and drink from glasses, properly; and Betty Fussell, a New York food writer who has graced many wine panel discussions, who said: Do I have an opinion? You betcha. Twice I’ve shipwrecked on a plastic cork and I’ve sworn no more plastic corks. The first time, the screwpull I’d used for 10 years, without incident, was split to the gunwales by an obstinate plastic cork. Out went the screwpull. The second time, since I was now screwpull-less, I used an old-fashioned double-handled, lever-type corkscrew and managed to get the cork out of the bottle, but not the screw out of the cork. I tried to cut the cork open with a butcher knife but wrecked the blade sawing against a brass screw. I threw out the knife, the corkscrew, the cork and hated the wine that had done that to me. From now on, when the world runs out of real cork from real trees, for me it’s screw tops all the way. While I’m fresh out of corkscrews, my hands still work.