No Closure In Sight

As part of my ongoing WSET Diploma, I had another exam this week, involving a case study on the debate surrounding wine closures—natural cork vs. synthetic vs. screw cap and everything in between. I researched the topic for a month before my exam and suffice it to say—they don’t call it a debate for nothing.

Cato wrote about sealing and preserving wines back in the 2nd century BC—an indication of just how much interest there has been on the subject over the millennia. If it weren’t for the fact that corks can go horribly wrong, the discussion may have ended hundreds of years ago.

But cork, being a natural product (harvested from the bark of the Quercus Suber oak) has a cellular structure that gives it uniquely resilient properties that also allow for inconsistency and microbial growth which can lead to premature oxidation or worse, to cork taint from a chemical compound known as 2, 4, 6 Trichloroanisole (TCA) that invades the bark and gives the wines musty, moldy aromas and flavors.

TCA is less of a problem today because the cork industry’s leading manufacturers have spent decades and millions of Euros establishing protocols to minimize the risk of contamination as well as on developing sophisticated cleaning methods that restrict the incidence and significantly reduce detectable levels of TCA.

Initially these measures were not undertaken fast enough—some say because the industry was in a monopoly-induced coma but to be fair, a highly fragmented supply chain and the lingering effects of a military coup in one of the major cork producing countries didn’t help.

Whatever the reasons for the sluggish response, taint continued to plague winemakers, drove entrepreneurs to develop synthetic closures and prompted some producers to reinvestigate the screw cap—a closure that first debuted on bottles of Thunderbird, then later on Gallo jug wines, airline bottles and the blockbuster wine from my own childhood, Riuniti.

Then there came to market, various reincarnations of natural cork that are cleaned up, sealed up and reconstituted by new technologies, not to mention glass stoppers, crown caps and new fangled inventions designed to twist like a cap and pop like a cork all of which claim to protect the wines while presenting to the consumer either the freshest possible product or the romance, tradition and ceremony long associated with “uncorking” a bottle.

To grossly oversimplify the state we are in today, let’s just say that research continues as to which of the current options is ideal not only from a scientific, gustatory and aesthetic standpoint but also from the latest incarnation of the debate—which of these closures has the least deleterious affect on the environment.
Partisan camps are able to choose from any number of studies, consumer surveys and carbon footprint audits to support their particular position. And with no consensus in sight—the question of how best to close a wine bottle is still open ended.

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