Is it cool to blog on a blog?
We’re still pretty new to this whole blogosphere thing but we saw something come up the other day that we just had to talk about. Whether or not its apropos to ‘re-blog’ we wouldn’t know, but we found this story too interesting to ignore.
For years we’ve been huge proponents of the screwcap. Ever since my first forays down to Australia in the mid-90’s, I’ve been fortunate enought to try many older examples of Australian white wines that had used this closure. The Rieslings and Semillons from the 70’s and 80’s that I had the opportunity to sample (drink) were fresh as daisies, almost strangely fresh given my experience with cork-finished examples of the same wines for the same time frames.
A few years later, the New Zealand wine bureaucrats came along and said they were openly endorsing and promoting Stelvin (screwcap) closures for all of their wines, high and low end, as the research results had been to obvious to ignore. These closures were met with only the smallest amount of skepticism that we could see on a retail level, people (other than those that actually put their corkscrew throught the middle of the cap) seemed to glom on quick enough and generally didn’t seem to care if they’re wine had a screwcap or not, just as long as it was good. This was refreshing to see.
Now we’re a few years into the whole screwcap thing and it has obviously taken hold. True, there have been some setbacks, most noticeably the lack of education and knowledge among red winemakers as to how to handle the sulfur levels to accomodate for potential reduction or shutting down of red wines (resulting in tight, compressed, pinched, lean flavors) bottled under screwcap. But they’re working it out. For whites it is a boon. Our white wine returns are minimal now, and everyone’s happy as clams. They’re actually getting what they paid for, and what the winemaker and grape grower had envisioned when they crafted it. And they’re easy to open, and easy to re-seal.
Recently, Wine Spectator’s Harvey Steiman posted a blog concerning a 10 year study put on by the Australian Wine Research Institute with regards to not just the TCA effects of traditional cork closures but also the more pronounced results of bottle variation that come with this imperfect seal. The researchers used, ”thousands of bottles of a 1999 Clare Sémillon made at Leasingham and sealed with 14 different closures. Once a year, researchers opened, analyzed and sampled the wines in the lab.” The romance of cork aside, the picture is startling:
The screwcap is on the left, all the rest are the cork-finished models. Amazing!
Take a look at the cork-finished bottles compared to the lone screwcap on the left. Enough said. The level of oxidation and bottle variation in the other bottles should not be what the winemaker or consumer is looking ofr when they make and/or sell the finished wines. Haut Brion Blanc under screwcap? Sacrilege I know…but I can’t wait. That being said, we are seeing many ‘little’ wines from both Burgundy and Bordeaux now utilizing this closure, with Chateau owners anxiously awaiting the results of their own research.
And this isn’t to say that screwcap is the be-all and end-all. Great results have been had with DAIM corks, as well as crown seals (like you find on beer bottles) as well as the vino-lok glass top closure being used by wineries like Calera and Sineann. In the end, modern technology has given us the opportunity to rid ourselves, through a numiber of means, of the cursed duo of TCA taint and bottle variation in one fell swoop. The old world charm of cork is just that, old world. At $500+ for a bottle of Lafite or Musigny, I’d feel more than comfortable taking the alternative seal plunge in a few years once winemakers have worked out all the bugs concerning red wine. But for the whites, the time has come.
