© by Nigel Lelew When you think about it, corks are strange aren’t they. I don’t know who originally thought of cutting the bark from the Quercus Suber tree into some kind of cylinder shape and then hammering the result into the neck of the bottle. Maybe it was the inventor of the corkscrew, an equally strange contraption! Corks are there to keep the wine in the bottle. People have devised a number of other ways over the years to keep things in bottles, and I guess the most popular of these things is actually the screw top cap which comes with most glass containers, that is except wine bottles! "So what", I hear you say, "why should we worry about corks". Well in fact there’s two problems with corks. Firstly a very small percentage of corks leak, (maybe 1 or 2 in every 100). This gets oxygen in contact with the wine which affects the taste by causing it to oxidise. Secondly, even without leaking, corks can affect the taste of the wine. They can cause the wine to be ‘corked’. (Not wines which have small pieces of cork floating in the glass when you pour them out. That’s just a badly pulled cork!). A corked wine is one where a particular chemical present in the raw bark of some of the cork oak trees suppresses the fruit flavour and taints the wine. Some estimates put the number of bottles affected by cork taint at up to 15%. That’s probably high, but it can still be a huge number of bottles worldwide, maybe around one and a half billion corked bottles. A corked wine smells musty and vegetal, and there is a similar taste. And a wine can be tainted to different degrees. It can be slightly tainted such that some people wouldn’t pick it up on the taste, or it can be so disgusting that anyone would reject it!!! There have been some developments in the realm of wine closures to try and stop corked wines. Some companies have developed synthetic corks, some have tried the crown cap, like the top on a beer bottle, and some have tried screw caps. To my mind the screw cap is the way to go, but I know I may be in a minority. Lets look at the facts. Its easy to open, doesn’t need any special piece of kit and if you don’t drink the whole bottle, it can be easily re-sealed. Well thats my plea for the screw cap. I know it doesn’t have a good image, just think of the screw cap and Lambrusco springs to mind, that weak fizzy Italian wine which here in the UK isn't anything like the true Lambrusco that the Italians themselves drink. Theres certainly a huge movement within the retail trade to encourage alternative closures to natural cork and I support that. So we will be seeing more and more screw caps and synthetic corks in our wine bottles, all for the sake of quality, which has to be good, doesn't it. Cheers!
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