Cork Vs. Screw Caps
The general purpose of a wine bottle closure is to prevent an excessive amount of oxygen from getting in. Wine generally does not keep too well. Those unmistakable nutty, sherry-like aromas, the disappearance of bright fruit, and browning color are signs of too much oxygen getting into our wine. While certain circumstances in winemaking and storage do call for the introduction of oxygen, generally speaking, too much oxygen is a bad thing when it comes to still wines. The two main wine stops are the screw cap and the cork. Below will depict when each are to be used and why.
Cork has always gone hand in hand with wine. Natural cork is harvested from the bark of two types of cork oak trees that grow in the Mediterranean and Iberian Peninsula. Due to its porous structure, cork allows tiny amounts of oxygen to enter the wine, which can benefit wines that are tannic and need time in the bottle for those tannins to soften. So, in this case, oxygen – in very small, controlled doses – can be a wine’s friend.
One thing to remember is cork is also prone to the development of TCA – or, trichloroanisole. This is referred to as “cork taint.” If you smell wet cardboard, musty basement, or mildewy dishcloth after opening a wine, cork taint it probably the culprit.
Screw caps were created in the mid 50s by the French. They are made of aluminum, usually with a small plastic liner on the inside. Wines that use screw caps are generally meant to be drank quickly as they also let air in.
Some winemakers argue that screw cap closures are good for high quality wines. In fact, certain wine regions have based their entire wine identity on screw cap wines; For example, screw caps represent about 90% of New Zealand wine stops.
There are plenty of other alternative stoppers, including synthetic corks, crown caps like the ones used for beer bottles and sodas and often reserved for natural wines, cork agglomerates made from pieces of ground up corks shaped into a cork-like closure, and even elegant apothecary-style glass bottle stoppers. each of these are good and bad depending on what you want, but they all generally get the job done. We typically drink mostly from natural corked bottled but screw caps are almost the exact same thing and maintain a high quality of Oxygen transfer. Do what works for you.
