Are We Holding onto Corks Because of Nostalgia or Refusal to Evolve?

Don’t get it twisted; screw caps aren’t a bad thing

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I have a collection of corks from a lifetime of wine love. Wicker baskets and Bordeaux crates in room corners, ceramic bowls on table tops… my home is sprinkled throughout with reminders of my adoration of wine.

The backsplash in the kitchen of my first home was made from corks hot-glued to the plastic wall. Every time I cooked a meal, the heat would cause a few to pop off and rain onto the counter. It made me smile every time it happened.

Because every time a cork was released, I was taken back to where I was when I opened that bottle.

If I’ve shared a bottle with you during an important moment in my life, I’ve written the date on the cork, and it’s still in the handbag I carried on that day. So I’m lovingly reminded of it — and you — every time I choose that bag for the day.

Corks are beautiful. I love the way they smell, even years after the wine has evaporated from its surface. I love the way they look — little golden nuggets of anticipation and memories.

I still have the corks from the bottles my husband and I opened to celebrate the births of our children in their memory box.

I never asked myself why I began, or continued, to collect them. And I haven’t added to this collection in many years. But I also haven’t thrown them away.

I don’t need them to remember that first home, those important moments shared with a friend… the births of my children.

And yet, I’m compelled to hold onto them.

I’ve studied wine for most of my adult life, a lot of it under the tutelage of restaurateur and sommelier, Caroline Styne when I ran the bar at A.O.C. in West Hollywood.

The restaurant famously has a cruvinet system, with 50 glasses of wine that changes daily. My job was to know them all — inside and out.

No matter how each of those bottles were opened, they were all hooked up to the same machine and enjoyed simply for the juice that lived inside.

Although I grew up mainly around cork enclosed wines, my first introduction to screw cap enclosures— apart from the wine juice I drank in my early college years — was New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs from Marlborough.

New Zealand and Australia rank as the highest producers of screw cap enclosed wines.), with over 90% of all NZ wines being sealed this way. But screw cap enclosures were actually first invented in Burgundy, France in the 1960’s. Then in 1970, Australian Consolidated Industries purchased the right to manufacture them and renamed it Stelvin.

For a debate that still remains controversial across the wine worlds, I say that’s a pretty solid old world / new world cuvée right there.

I fell in fast love with those New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs in college; intrigued and inspired by the passion fruit and grapefruit notes I’d never tasted before in a wine.

But I never saved a cap.

I don’t have baskets and crates and bowls of metal caps decorating my home. It never occurred to me to keep them.

I have likely enjoyed just as many wines that I had to unscrew to get to as I have ones that required a tool.

Yet I have only considered to remind myself of the ones where corks were involved.

Corks are tradition. Corks are nostalgic. Corks are romantic. There’s nothing appealing or interesting about watching someone swiftly twist their wrist to the right.

There are a lot of factors that go into deciding if screw caps could be better than corks — or vice versa — and I don’t think we can ever claim either as fact. Just like the kind of wine you may think is best, saying that one enclosure is overall superior is quite subjective.

We like what we like for our own reasons. And I, for one, find that to be one of my favorite things about wine.

I can’t tell you that a red Burgundy is better than a Sonoma Pinot. Even the things we taste and smell in a wine can differ, and that doesn’t mean one is right and the other is wrong. My raspberry could be your strawberry simply based on a sense memory that only you have.

But there are reasons that the screw cap could be more beneficial in some areas, whether the reason is simply convenience…

Sommelier Cam O’Keefe writes in the Sydney Morning Herald —

“In the heat of a busy service, sometimes knowing you can have that top off in literally two seconds is a blessing.”

Or regarding quality control…

The Australian Wine Institute tasted the same wines sealed with various enclosures over a 2 year period. They concluded that —

*“After nine months under screwcap, each bottle of the same wine tasted the same… But the same wine under eight different cork closures all varied in taste.*

Regardless of the testimonials and research done on the subject, many wine drinkers are still holding onto the notion that corks are superior.

Roger Dooley of Forbes writes —

“Many consumers, even those who aren’t wine snobs, experience a twinge of doubt when confronted with a screw top.”

And many consumers are even willing to spend more money on them because of that assumption, surmising that the quality of the wine is higher based solely on the cork.

After conducting an experiment in Austria, The International Journal of Wine Business Research wrote that —

“…consumers are willing to pay a higher price for wines in bottles with cork closures than for wine bottles that are closed with a screw cap”

There was a scientific study done in London where the results showed that drinkers preferred the bottles they thought had come from a cork-enclosed bottle 15% more than what they thought came from a screw cap.

The participants each sampled wines after they heard the sound of a cork being popped and a cap being unscrewed. They were then given the same bottles to open themselves, each sealed differently but otherwise the same inside.

The drinkers were asked to rate things like aroma and sight, but also ambience and sound. And 113 out of 140 participants chose the cork-enclosed bottles.

Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, and conductor of that experiment, said —

“The sound and sight of a cork being popped sets our expectations before the wine has even touched our lips, and these expectations then anchor our subsequent tasting experience. These results emphasise the importance of closures for wine and the clear association between cork and quality in our subconscious.”

We are a society rich with tradition and sentiment. And that’s not a bad thing. But it can be a hindrance if we are relying solely on the sentiment and remembrance of things in choosing what we think is the better option.

The practical argument against screw caps usually involves bottle aging. Every varietal and blend benefits from different amount of aging, but the small amounts of air that a cork can allow in, over time, adds to the depth and complexity of the wine as it ages.

Yes.

But it’s also a risk.

Vine Pair writes —

“…The classic cork is prone to degrading, and 5 percent of all wines with corks are infected with cork taint. Even aging a wine with a cork for a considerable amount of time is a gamble with those stats. Screw caps, in comparison, are more airtight..”

Corks are porous. And each cork differs in its porosity, because each cork is different.

Traditional corks, made from punching out the shape from the boiled and dried cork tree bark, are the most porous. But even agglomerated corks, which are pieces of cork adhered together to form a solid piece, still are porous.

And since air easily slips in through a cork, you are putting the wine in danger of oxidizing and becoming undrinkable.

Then there’s that issue of dreaded cork taint. Cork taint manifests itself as that moldy, dusty smell from a freshly opened bottle of wine. It’s caused by the chemical compound, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, or TCA.

TCA is something that exists in the cork bark itself before harvesting, but isn’t detectable. And so many wines die inside the bottle because of it… bringing the souls of the winemakers down with it.

Technical corks — agglomerated cork bodies with discs of natural cork glued to either its top or either end — are a much better option for eliminating TCA, but wines enclosed with them are still at risk.

Because cork comes from nature.

And we cannot control nature.

So every cork-enclosed bottle of wine — even if it remains ‘good’ — will differ from its siblings, because every cork it is sealed with is different.

Wines sealed with a screw cap carry no such risk. Each and every bottle will be consistent with its brother and sister.

And a lot of wines actually benefit from this closure because their aromatics are better preserved. So many screw cap wines can even be aged longer than those sealed with a cork, as there’s less of a ‘drink-by date’ concern.

MaryAnn Worobiec, a.k.a “Dr. Vinny” from Wine Spectator says —

“You can certainly age wines with screwcaps. I’ve done it for years, and I’ve also sat through many vertical tastings of wines bottled under screwcap. In general, wines under screwcap age more slowly than those bottled with cork. Their fresh, fruity notes stick around for longer, and there’s less bottle variation.”

My friend, Kathleen Inman of Inman Family Wines in The Russian River Valley made the choice to only enclose her bottles with screw caps in 2002.

She told Food & Wine —

“I made this choice for a number of reasons — primarily consistency, quality and ease for the consumer. And I have found that my wines have aged wonderfully in screw caps.”

And on Instagram, she wrote —

“Inman Family wines from 15 years ago are still developing beautifully under a screwcap closure. We also love that they are easier for our customers to open and to store!”

With so much research pointing in the direction of screw caps being a safer choice for enclosing our wines… it makes one wonder why there is still a push-back.

Why are we still on opposing teams when we are all hoping for the same outcome? Why must one side be new and different and therefore scary… while the other side rests solely on ‘this is just the way it’s always been done.’

In the modern world in which we now live, technology is updated daily. News and music and conversations come through watches on our wrists. We hold tiny computers in our pockets. We take photographs from the same machine that allows us to speak to one another.

All things that the people who came before us couldn’t even fathom as a possibility.

We can still hold onto the love of the past and also evolve with the times. We don’t have to choose. That’s what living is. Pouring in everything that came before us, swirling it with the hopes of what will come, and creating the space in which we are today.

If we refuse to change with the times and accept new truths, we stop living. We stop learning. We stop connecting.

Sharing a bottle of wine — just like sharing a meal — is connecting you to someone. Memories are exchanged over those pours and bites. Occasions are celebrated. Long days, punctuated.

And if we can get past what makes up the outside of something and focus on what’s inside — and who we get to share it all with — we can all be a little more connected.

An agglomeration, if you will.

I still don’t think I’ll be collecting metal caps for decoration in my home, but I’d like to think that keeping my corks around bridge the gap between the good ole days and the bright future.

Cheers.

Rooted stories are for entertainment purposes only and should not be considered as nutritional, health or any other sort of advice.