“Your prescriptions are ready, Ms Rosen. Just wait while I wrap your leeches and fungus in this squirrel pelt.”
Absurd? No more so than sealing an expensive, fragile liquid with a chunk of tree bark. Brilliant new technology in 1640, corks could compress to fit in a bottleneck and then expand to keep out air. They ushered in an era of elegant, age-worthy wine and made possible the bottling of another new invention: Champagne. But today, in this age of onboard GPS and solar-powered nose-hair clippers, isn’t it time for a change?
Consider the problems: corks only seal when moist. Stand the bottle up and they shrink and let air in. Even lying down, they dry out eventually. That’s how the cork crumbles.
They harbor all sorts of wildlife, like the hole-boring cork weevil. Worst critter of all is TCA, the bacteria responsible for “cork taint,” often compared to moldy newspapers and vintage gym shorts.
Despite those descriptions, though, most people don’t recognize it. They poured corky wine at a James Beard Foundation dinner and no one noticed. I was there accepting an award for a column on - don’t laugh - cork taint. So I went around giving the roomful of food luminaries, in many cases, their first comparative whiff.
But even knowing the smell isn’t enough, because in smaller concentrations, TCA can rob wine of all vibrant flavors without leaving a trace of its own presence. Winemakers hate this. One corked bottle can turn a customer off their brand for life.
It takes forty-three years for a tree to yield high-grade cork. Harvesting is done by hand and axe, followed by six months of curing and then boiling. Sheets of bark are carefully guided by laborers through a punching machine, after which the cork plugs are sorted, dried, sanded, sterilized, bleached, branded, coated, injected with SO2, bagged and finally shipped.
The recent convergence of young, techno-friendly wine drinkers with a world-wine glut that put more bad corks on the market has Portugal, the leading cork-producer, scrambling.
They’re mounting huge campaigns to prop up their image; cleaning up factories and fighting TCA in ever-new ways. When that fails, there are things like Dream Taste, a French invention using ionized copolymers to absorb tainted molecules in wine. The process takes up to an hour, strips other flavors and aromas, and costs $60 plus another $5 for the chemicals to treat each bottle. Plus, you can get the same effect using a Ziploc bag.
Why bother? Why not switch to…“Screw-caps?” scoff the corkies, “Fine for young, frivolous whites. But fine, important reds must breathe oxygen through the cork to age properly.” Recent studies, though, show oxygen already present in sufficient amounts. There was a short scare about “reductive,” or rotten-egg aromas in wines under screw-cap. But they turned out to be winemaking faults, previously covered up by the even worse odor of TCA.
“But, the image, the tradition!” comes the cry. We, the public, they insist, are enamored of pain-in-the-ass cork-pulling. Let an appalling percentage of our wine be spoiled - so long as we hear that pop! We might have traded candles for halogen and horses for Pintos, but this, we’ll never accept.
Except, apparently, in Australia, now unscrewing some 40% of its wine. Or New Zealand, a whopping 90% of whose output gets the righty-tighty, lefty-loosy treatment. It seems to be a matter of education. Wine wonks were first to board the screw train. Young trendies who unscrew Tanquerey Ten and Ketel One without complaint are easy converts. “Cork-free zones” are showing up on the wine-lists of hipper restaurants.
What of other closures? Bottle caps work, but require a tool. So do synthetics; besides, they pull away from the bottle neck over time and people think they’re ugly. Hybrids are springing up, like Zork, a kind of covered, replaceable, screw/cork thing, and Vino-Lok, an elegant glass stopper secured with rubber o-rings. Both deliver the ever-important pop.
Still, screw-caps lead the pack. “Well then,” sputter the cork-heads, “how about restaurants? Diners can’t possibly enjoy an upscale meal without the pop and circumstance of a good uncorking!”
True, sommeliers, are a concerned about screwing-up the opening ceremony. Do you present the customer with the cap? (The consensus is no; sharp edges are a lawsuit-in-waiting.) I’ve heard tales of servers covering the cap with a napkin, turning around and making a popping sound with their mouth. Still, all the soms I know are pro-screw.
But, luckily, for those who insist on complicating a simple thing, there’s the Wine Fritz: a big metal cap that conceals the small metal cap from sensitive-eyed consumers both during and after the twist-off. It even claims to make a “distinctive sound,” although to me it was more of a grind than a pop.
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