Thursday, September 6 2007
Wine Geek or Cork Dork?
Appellation America has a very interesting interview with Jason Haas of Tablas Creek Vineyards on the use of screw cap closures vs. corks. Tablas Creek uses both, depending on the wine being bottled.
A lot of folks would like an easy answer to corks vs. screwcap or corks vs. engineered closures (plastic corks), but it's not that simple. While natural corks suffer from organic contamination, mainly in the form of trichloroanisole, which ruins 3 to 10% of all wine, hermetic closures (like metal screwcaps) don't work as well for reductive wines, which benefit from a little ingress of oxygen during ageing. According the Haas,
JH: Wines bottled under screw caps taste fresher, higher in acid, younger, tighter, and more minerally. Wines bottled under cork taste mellow, sweeter, richer, more open and more evolved. By sweeter, I mean the way that people describe sweet oak. It also tastes lower in acid, which translates to a perception of sweetness.
While still supporting natural cork products, Winexpert (well okay, me) is recommending Nomacorc closures for home winemakers. While they allow controlled ingress of oxygen over time, it's well controlled, and because they aren't made from tree bark, they don't have a problem with tricholoranisole. They do require a proper floor corker to go into the bottle smoothly, but once in they stay put well, and are very easy to extract, and they don't chip, split, tear or leak over time.
I was lucky enough to meet with some cork importers earlier this year, and they had a lot to say about the improvements their industry has seen in the last ten years. I'm hoping to have a chance to talk a bit more to them in Spring, and report on it here.
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