Just Screw It

The Battle of Corks vs. Screw Caps

As with most new countries I travel to, when I first moved to South Africa in 2010 my first order of business was to try the local wine in an effort to complete effective due diligence. To my dismay, I discovered that South Africa’s preferred closure for its Stellenbosch wines is the screw cap. While my inner (naïve) wine snob scoffed at the idea of a fine wine being served with a screw cap, I admittedly didn’t really know the true difference between a cork and a screw cap. Though I loved the fanfare associated with popping a cork, I found minimal difference in the taste of the actual wine. As screw caps for wines were once associated primarily with cheaper wines, I have learned that winemakers are increasingly interested in screw caps, forcing consumers to get over their predisposition for cork. The ‘Mastering Wine’ chapter of The Wine Bible addressed this very issue as it questioned whether the tradition of sealing wine with a cork is indeed archaic and considered whether screw caps are becoming the future of the wine industry.

The transition to screw caps for a wine closure stems from the highly involved nature of a typical wine cork. Cork comes from cork oak trees, which are found in a handful of Mediterranean countries, with the top quality corks coming from Portugal. Once a cork tree is harvested, it must then be stripped, boiled, steamed, and then dried for several weeks before it is finished into the final product. The key problem with this is that when wineries use water to clean barrels and equipment, it can facilitate the growth of the chemical compound TCA, which can contaminate corks and ultimately spoil the taste of wine (a problem aptly dubbed “corked” wine). As such, several wine producers have opted to pursue a more technologically advanced solution, the screw cap, in the hope of maintaining the same top-quality tasting wine. In Australia (and similarly in South Africa), there has been a huge initiative to transition to stoppering wines with screw caps. While some wine enthusiasts are likely to shun this new innovation in defense of tradition, it is possible that the ongoing threat of TCA contamination as well as the expected environmental strain on cork oak trees will lead to even more growth of the screw cap closures.

As we get more and more guest speakers in our class, I remain very curious to learn more about the packaging of wines and the decision making process that  winemakers use to determine the optimal type of closure. I am also curious about which countries will follow in the footsteps of Australia and South Africa in hopes of making the screw cap closure ubiquitous across all price points. Lastly, I want to get a better understanding of the oxidization process and how winemakers can ensure the same taste under a different closure process. While some of the nicer wineries in Napa have adopted the screw cap on even their most premium wine selections, I find it difficult to expect the same of an old storied family-owned French estate. As we learned with Thibaut Scholasch, there will always be a clash between technological advances and the romanticism of a decades-long tradition.

From a personal standpoint, I have grown accustomed to screw cap wines and through several consumed bottles of screw cap wines, I can attest that a wine bottle’s closure is not necessarily indicative of its overall quality. That said, there is still no music sweeter to my ears than the familiar “phweeet”** of uncorking a bottle of red. If given a choice, I’ll stick with tradition.

**it took me about 30 minutes to figure out how to spell this sound…just go with it