Seems a long time ago now, there was a great debate about whether twist caps could ever be as good as corks for wine, with arguments that cork allowed the wine to breathe, etc.
Now, nearly every bottle of wine I buy has a twist-off. It’s just higher price ranges that seem to have corks.
So, was it determined that corks were just wine snobbery? Or am I drinking wine on par with Chateau Thames Embankment, which couldn’t be saved by a cork anyway?
Corks got wicked expensive due to rarity & fungal problems; they tried to come up with a synthetic alternative which doesn’t work as well, so they said “meh, twist-off’s okay if it’s going to get drunk within the next month and a half.” You really only need to cork-age the wine if it’s going to be sitting in a rack for years before you drink it.
Funny… all the wine I’ve bought this year has had corks. And it’s not like I’m buying high-priced stuff.
Well! There goes Portugal’s economy! (The orchards of Portugal are filled with cork trees, devoted to providing cappers for European wines.)
Forty years ago screw-cap wine was a bad joke, but now I disregard the sealant when I shop. Plenty of screw-cap wines are the equal of corked ones, and I drink everything I buy within a month or two anyway.
Mostly won by screwcaps, albeit AMORIM, and I want to say the University of Bordeaux, got together and develop cleansing and screening processes that knocked the incidence of cork taint down to ~0.5 percent or so. As opposed to the 2-6 percent it used to be. Also, we have better aging data for wines aged under screwcaps now. Australia has good data from IIRC, the 50s and 60s. The wine ages the same, albeit slower than it does under cork.
Cork taint is unfortunately named, FWIW. I’ve personally tasted 2,4,6 TCA in foods like canned Diet Coke. It’s a processing hygiene issue, not specifically a cork issue, though the bugs that make cork taint are readily found on cork.
I wish the industry would go to crown caps, like are used in beer and soft drinks (and for bottles aging on lees in the Champagne Process). But other than one quixotic German producer I read about, who went out of business, no one else seemed to want to do it. It works great for aging vintage Bollinger , waiting to be disgorged for 20 years, but it doesn’t work for the consumer market. Weird.
Screwcaps are just fine.
Screwcaps are winning because they are better in pretty much every way. The biggest reason is that they result in much fewer bottles of wine being lost due to being “corked”. The general public is coming around, but the winemakers who want their product to survive many years of storage already know.
And they’re cheaper than corks.
The cheap wines we buy at GrossOut (Grocery Outlet aka Dented Cans) are mostly corked. The premium wines we bought today at a fairly premium Napa winery were corked. But I don’t survey all the offerings at BevMo (Beverages And More) so I don’t know the relative distribution or prices. Some website probably details those statistics, right?
FWIW I didn’t know there was a debate— I definitely see both screw caps and corks in what seem like at least roughly equal numbers. More corks, if anything. What is in the minority, and I am suspicious about, are those non-cork stoppers. Acceptable bung or cheap piece of shit?
Screw caps are superior, but the snobbery factor keeps wine makers from using them.
I don’t remember the exact number, but a very, very high percentage of wine sold is consumed within a few weeks of purchase (I want to say the number is in the high 80% range; it’s possible it’s even higher). The stopper has very little impact on this wine, so there is essentially no debate; whatever the producer uses will be fine. I’m sure the biggest reason that screw caps are not even more widespread is image; the average consumer still associates screw caps with cheap wine.
For higher-end wines, cork still dominates, and I suspect will for a long time yet. Mostly because of tradition, partly because the jury is still out (I believe) as to how wines age in screw tops. I wouldn’t expect Chateau Margeaux to switch to screw caps without knowing for sure that their wines would age like they want them to. I know that there are manufacturers putting efforts into designing screw caps that breathe like corks, but I’d be surprised if these are ever widely adopted. Who knows?
I’ve come across a few small producers who sometimes use crown caps (often for pet nats and other sparklers), but they are few and far between. I suspect it’s more public perception/marketing issues.
The long term performance of screws caps has already been tested and is still better than cork in nearly all cases. There are a few types of winemaking where it hasn’t been fully demonstrated but they are superior for nearly all high end wines. It’s the perception that is blocking adoption.
AFAIK, twist-off won.
Yeah, this. I think probably 40% of the wine I buy is screw caps, 40% is traditional cork and 20% is plastic cork. Italy seems to prefer plastic cork over screw caps, which is presumably snob value around using a corkscrew, and France seems most resistant to change from traditional corks. Spain and, interestingly, Portugal, seem happy to give anything a go.
(I tend to buy old world wine).
In the UK, the wine I buy is probably 75-25 screw-cap to cork. When I bring wine back from Austria it is 95-5, when bringing it back from France, 5-95.
Screw cap is fine.