Tim, thank you very much for your very informative input and your appropriate disclosure.
Dale and John,
Were there the same wines bottled under screwcap and cork to compare in this tasting? If not, how do you know that the ‘reductive’ wines were not problematic in general, and thus had nothing to do with the closure?
This to me is a major problem - blaming issues on closures that may be due to other factors. This is NOT something you generally ‘assume incorrectly’ with TCA and corks . . . unless their are systemic issues at the winery itself.
Cheers.
Er… really? Maybe that’s truer among some wine drinkers, but 10 years isn’t even vaguely old by my standards. If a wine started to go over the hill in a decade because of the closure, that closure is a failure.
Exactly. If you are debating the environmental implications of screwcaps vs corks, I think you can’t see the forest for the trees.
Yeah - I phrased that wrong… “Nobody” is the wrong word, but it is true that less than 1/10 of 1% of wine is fits into the category you are talking about.
For those producers, they can certainly choose a closure that lets less oxygen in, but to be certain those ageable wines are by definition the ones that have the capacity to absorb more oxygen. Even within the range that I have described, a closure that lets 5ppm of oxygen into the wine over 10 years will let an age-able red have a lifespan many more times that.
The point is that we will finally have control. I have opened quite a few 20+ year old bottles and about half the time they are over the hill. The other half… sublime to be sure. When we finally take control of the fate of a wine post-bottling the people who will benefit the most will be the ones that hold on to a bottle for as long as you do - knowing that all that patience will not be wasted.
I agree about the control issue… but, frankly, who really cares about the $15 white you drink in the week after you buy it? The issues are very different for mass market wine than ageworthy, ‘serious’ wine. Honestly, I don’t care that much if I buy a case of $9 Picpoul and one is bad. I also don’t really care if the closure will last 10 years on that wine.
Honestly, the closure debate for mass market wines isn’t one of quality, it’s market acceptance from the large population that buys wines and drinks them that night or within a couple of weeks. Those people aren’t going to worry about the same issues as someone who cellars hundreds of bottles for a decade or more. The debates on boards like this are all about how the various closures do for serious wines. Some of those are drunk young, some are aged 10 years, others are aged 20+… but THOSE are where the real issues are.
However, this is only of intellectual interest to me. I’m 52. Even if the serious wine world completely converts to your style of closure over the next decade, I don’t care as I’m not buying 20+ year wine in any quantity when I’m 62. So, the closure debate is really a dead issue to me.
It’s obvious that corks have issues - any alternative will have to reduce those issues drastically AND not introduce new ones. Wineries who have built a reputation on the age-worthiness of their wines won’t switch without long trials (otherwise how will they know that their wines will age as well under screw-cap as they’re known to under cork?). What that means is that most of the people who collect now and are 35ish or older will never see most of their ageworthy wines under anything but cork.
Rick, I think you are dead-on. Ill just clarify one point:
The big issue with mass-market wines is not how they age - but with consistency.
Corks are the MOST variable in the first few months of life, during what is called the “recovery phase” Studies have shown that a large fraction of corks can let in the 5ppm we worry about in under a year.
These wines are also designed to be very drinkable at a young age. Which means more in-cellar oxygen exposure and riper tannins to begin with which means lower tolerance to additional oxygen.
Wines that improve with 20 years of age… are pretty tough to drink upon release. And they are more tolerant of the early oxygen.
The point is that corks fail both ways, and every wine consumer, regardless of price point, deserves better than a 5% defect rate.
I only wish I could go back in time and get some of my screwcaps into your collection… I think you’d be thrilled!
But 1) Most people dont’ see a 5% defect rate. That 5% includes defects that appear over time and is an average of all cork closures (though I agree with the overall point you make here), 2) A HUGE number of all wines are consumed the day they’re bought or the next day so even a year’s time isn’t relevant, 3) The ‘wines that age are hard to drink on release’ thing is a myth from the older Cali Cab times and perhaps the Bordeaux times. I’ve had things like Jamet and many Burgs on release and they’re lovely.
Don’t misunderstand me - I think we do need to replace closures with something that’s more consistent, lower in defect rate and allows ageworthy wines to positively evolve over time. I just have given up caring past the intellectual curiosity stage because it will never be relevant to the wines I collect.
Hi Larry and Dale,
"Were there the same wines bottled under screwcap and cork to compare in this tasting? If not, how do you know that the ‘reductive’ wines were not problematic in general, and thus had nothing to do with the closure?
This to me is a major problem - blaming issues on closures that may be due to other factors. This is NOT something you generally ‘assume incorrectly’ with TCA and corks . . . unless their are systemic issues at the winery itself."
Your point is well taken Larry, but to my knowledge, all of the 2008 Gamay bottlings from Edmunds St. John were bottled uder SC. I did have two samples of each of the '08 bottlings- Bone-Jolly Gamay and Porphyry Gamay- and both bottles of the '08 Bone-Jolly were reduced (the one Dale and I shared at our tasting being the less reduced of the two by quite a wide margin). Of the two '08 Porphyry Gamay bottles, the one at our tasting was the most reduced wine of the entire lineup (one ardent fan of screwcaps at the tasting commented upon opening it:" damn, it’s reduced- we are never going to hear the end of this…", but the second bottle showed no signs of reduction and was outstanding. So at least in terms of the '08 Porphyry, I think we can surmise that it is a closure, rather than a wine issue (though two bottles is hardly a statistically meaningful sample). Probably, if Steve Edmunds had not had his hands tied with maximum levels for residual copper in the wine he could have “prepared the wine properly” with a sturdy copper fining and it would not have been reduced, but his hands were tied and our health was not potentially jeapordized.
In terms of Dale’s recollection that the 2005 Rocks and Gravel was corked, I am sure he is right, but I did not have that one on my scorecard, as I was manning the stoves and the grill that day while others were opening the wines, and I had forgotten the corked bottle. So make that one bottle out of twenty-one. I will still take that percentage in comparison to my own personal casualty rate on the SC wines. I should note that several folks at the tasting also gave a pass to the 2008 Heart of Gold white from ESJ sealed under SC (which I thought might be reduced), noting that “Steve Edmunds just does not have the same touch with whites” and dismissing the wine as a poor wine, not a flawed wine. I had never had the bottling before, so I had no baseline to compare it to, but I was not so sure that the issue was not simply low level reduction.
In any case, this is what I think is one of the biggest risks for winery principals who decide to go the SC route as they are configured today (when Tim’s oxygen-permeable liners are online it will be a most welcome turn of events), as I would be willing to bet the cellar that 95% of consumers and a hefty percentage of wine journalists could not even spot a wine suffering from reduction. They will simply tell you they don’t like the wine and conclude that Winery X makes crappy sauvignon blanc and never buy it again- without ever asking why the wine is the way it is.
Certainly at a big Penfold’s Press event about 18 months or so ago in NY, I was the only journalist who spotted a badly reduced bottle of riesling from the most recently released vintage (sealed under SC)- the winemaker who was in attendance readily acknowledged that the wine was badly reduced. When we had the 1999 vintage of the same wine out of magnum and sealed under natural cork, it was simply singing and a really fine bottle. Several journalists commented to me privately “that it is a shame Penfold’s no longer makes riesling of the same quality level as they did back in 1999!”
The bottom line it seems to me is that most consumers and even many pros cannot recognize post-bottling reduction issues in a wine, but they certainly can recognize that they do not like the wine is question if it is suffering from reduction issues. The risk is that those consumers will be lost to a winery forever and no one will notice it until the bottom falls out of the market. All it takes is a quick scan of the current export figures for Australian wines to see that the market can turn on a dime (of course, SC and reduction issues may have nothing to do with this, but I have a hard time believing that wines that were once so deservedly popular in export markets could really fall that fast from consumers’ graces without some fundamental causes) and it strikes me that it is a very slippery slope for winery principals to embrace SC under their current guise. When Tim’s liners are part of the standard equation, it may well dramatically alter the playing field, but unless I misread something above, we are not there yet. And do we really need to continue to debate whether or not post-bottling reduction under SC is a serious problem- if it were not, there would be no need for Tim’s improved liners in the first place!
All the Best,
John
Again, for the sake of accuracy, I believe it was me who said I’ve always preferred the reds to the whites. But that was based on maybe 100 bottles of ESJ over the last 10 years, and only recently has he started using screwcaps. I don’t think it’s Steve, it’s just that I never seem to love white Rhone varietals (though I usually like Steve’s versions). I just looked at the 3 opinions I can find from that dinner, and all 3 seemed to like (but not love) the 08 Heart of Gold (and we all clearly preferred to the cork finished '04 Roussanne, for that matter, which I believe was the wine that prompted my comment). Who dismissed the Heart of Gold as a poor wine? One of the many dangers of anecdotal evidence is that it’s easy to be selective with what we remember.
I’m no big SC fan (or detractor). They make up 1% of my cellar (I don’t count “drink nows”, other than that I have maybe 20 bottles) . As I said, I’m not very sensitive to reduction, and maybe I miss it a lot. But if it doesn’t bother me, it doesn’t concern me. I’ll happily admit you’re a better taster than I am, but what I taste is all that matter to me. For instance, I’ve had a bunch of bottles of screwcapped ESJ rose, and loved them all, am I supposed to now dislike because someone tells me they’re reduced?
John,
Thanks for the insight and interesting points.
My main comment is that the argument you use ‘against’ screwcaps - that most people won’t even realize the wine is reduced; they just won’t like it and won’t purchase it again - is one of my arguments against natural corks . . . that even if the wine is not blatantly corked (as if most consumers have any clue as to what that means) but is slightly corked or oxidized due to a bad cork, they will dismiss the wine as ‘bad’, not knowing that it was the closure that caused this.
I do not want to sound like a broken record, but the fact is that unless you can compare the same wine under cork and screwcap, it is impossible to state that the closure caused the problem - there is no clear cause/effect relationship here. You certainly can infer this, as you are doing, but neither you nor I will ever know for sure.
And just because yoiu had two bottles that were reduced does not mean that that entire ESJ bottling of that specific wine was as well - my guess is that Steve would get out in front of this and recall the wines if the problem was systemic. He does not seem to be the type of guy who would shy away from this.
Speaking of that tasting, was Steve in attendance, and if so, what did he thinki? If not, has he been contacted to get his take on this?
Thanks again for the insight and I look forward to the continued discussion.
Cheers!
Hi Larry,
You are absolutely right about the inability to accurately attribute the reduction to the closure without making a clinical test of the same wine under a variety of closures. I will have to dig in my files on the issue to see if any such trials have been done, but off the top of my head, most of the studies I have seen that have compared different closures and the same wines have been oxygen permeability tests, rather than those testing for reduction. I have reams of scientific papers on oxygen permeability and transfer rates for various closures, but I will have to see if anyone has done such a test measuring reduction. Have you done any studies in this regard?
All the Best,
John
John,
Thanks once again for the reply. I personally have not conducted any research on screw caps and reduction, nor screw caps vs. corks. My ‘studies’ have been anecdotal at best -trying as many wines under screw cap as I can find, talking with producers who do both, talking to Somms at high traffic restaurants, etc.
I’m certainly not stating that the potential for reductiveness is not there - it certainly may be. But just because there is the potential of something happening does not mean it actually does happen.
You never did answer my question about Steve E - was he at the tasting that was conducted of his wines? If so, what was his reaction/explanation of the ‘reductive’ issues? If not, did anyone reach out to him to discuss systemic issues?
Cheers!
I’ll pop in with a few comments here. I am on the road in Europe now (Bordeaux, Languedoc, Penedes and, now, Dao) and writing from internet cafes, so can’t take too much time to fill in details. Sorry, short answers here. Also, I don’t have access to my references, so I am talking from memory, which may mistate a few details or figures. So pre-apologies for this off the cuff response. I also may not be able to get back online to respond for a few days either, as internet access isn’t guaranteed. But I thought I’d drop in a few comments.
Before I dive in, I want to remind those who don’t know that my main issues with SC, since the first time I wrote about their faultiness in 2003, have focused on a lack of proper oxygen transference post-bottling. I didn’t see any benefit in swapping TCA faultiness for another fault that SC were even more prone to: either full-on sulphide reduction faultiness or the sub-threshold level stage that inhibits the expression of a wine’s full potential.
I wrote on several occasions in 2003-2005 that SC had potential once they developed a variety of liners that allowed different levels of oxygen to pass through wine after bottling that could temper different varieties from different vintages and terroirs to make wines for different purposes. I was talking what Tyler proposes seven years ago and was told I was told to shut up because I was wrong. That said, there are new issues that make me less comfortable with this now.
Regardless of that without a doubt if all the lemmings in Australia and New Zealand had had Tim’s liners during the last 10 years you probably wouldn’t have heard much from me on closure issues. After 10 years of lying, delusion and denial it will be interesting to see how many people adopt these new liners. And how many willingly buy back the wines they’ve sold over the last decade.
And so I’m glad to hear that Tim may have some alternative solutions to what, from my experience, has been an insurmountable problem in the past (Tim has tossed out a lot of stuff that needs more response than I can thoughtfully offer while on the hop here, so that may have to wait. Apologies there.) The one size fits all solution that SC lobby has pushed over the last 10 years is and always has been nonsense, given chemistry and the difficulty (impossibility?) of measuring redox potential accurately in individual wines. (Although I understand that testing may be getting cheap enough and accurate enough that this could be a universal possibility in future.)
All that said, given the wealth of new research focused on cork and oxygen transference, its becoming clearer that cork is a very complex material that is going to be extremely difficult to emulate. How wine eats up SO2 in its first month, first 6 months, and thereafter in bottle is, from what little I understand, much, much more complex than Tim proposes here. We’ll need a wine chemist to answer those questions.
Unfortunately, there has been a lot of garbage ‘science’ put forth that was fed to the press by the SC lobby that was (still is) blindly parroted on to consumers by journalists. This residue of false or distorted information is still stinking up the market. More enlightened scientists and scientific views deserved a greater hearing over the last decade and they didn’t get it. I don’t have a lot of faith they will in future either.
In scanning the world of wine journalism I know of only a handful of journalists who have attempted to investigate and understand all the difficult science that underpins the closure (non?)debate: myself, George Tabor, Sally Eastman MW, Jamie Goode, Tim Patterson, David Schildknect and John Gilman. It’s difficult, heavy going stuff, rocket science really. Sadly, its hard to get accurate, useful information published, whereas lots of bone headed columnists and wine gurus are given unlimited space to spout illogical dribble. The amount of research need to refine a closure article text reduces the pay per word to a losing proposition. Nevertheless, many, many journalists should have made more of an effort over the last decade. It’s a lot easier to say corks suffer from TCA therefore SCs are perfect. A lot of wine gurus out there have failed consumers big time.
So off the soap box:
“John, from what I’ve read reduction and TCA taint occur at about the same rate with their respective closures.”
There has been research on this and the reduction rates in around 10 clinical studies done globally over the last decade has 100% of SC specimens showing sulphide reduction at 6-18 months after bottling. In one of the early AWRI studies from around 2001, if I recall correctly, there was one cork stoppered wine that showed 'sulphide reduction within 18 months, but by the second examination at 24 or 36 months it had disappeared because that cork’s oxygen mechanism cleaned it up. I’ve not seen cork or synthetics suffer from reduction in any other studies. So there are very different rates of sulphide reduction for cork, SC and synthetics. The longer a wine is in a SC stoppered bottle the more likely it will reduce and become more reductive. Not all will, but more will at rates much higher than TCA ever presented.
As for TCA, several recent, big wine competitions with thousands of wines opened have pegged TCA at below 1%. The last two Mondial du Bruxelles in Europe had less than 1%, based on 7,000 wines at each comp. Indianapolis Wine Comp last year had similar findings. As did a big tasting in Rioja last year that Robert Parker reported on.
I think an important factor being missed here is that the bulk of that 1% is probably being driven by the residual, tiny ‘mom and pop’ cork producers who don’t have the technology, quality control, preventatives and curative washes in place to clean up their corks. If you knocked them out of the equation and leaving only the big producers that increasingly dominate the market, that figure would be considerably lower. Once the cowboys are driven from business, TCA should be an even rarer occurrence. The other factor is that without a doubt, new cork is cleaner than older cork. So competitions will still show a residue of older wines with older, dirtier corks. If Parker’s Rioja tasting was showing only 2008 Grand Reservas TCA rates would be much lower than the 95-2000 reservas/GR he was looking at the time. Part of the problem with the Pro-SCers is they are living 10 years in the past and tossing around figures and realities that were more relevant than.
The only SC reduction vs tainted cork figures I’ve seen has come out of IWC in London about 4 years ago and those figures have been poorly analysed and presented, and, sadly, badly confused. The most important factor being they never associated bottle age with faultiness, which could have given us much more precise information on reduction, cork TCA vs winery TCA, and oxidation (in all SC, synthetics and corks). The few stats they gave suggested SC and cork (which included synthetics???) failure rates were about equal. I think the total for all closure failures was around 4%. Wasted potential really, but they could fix that with better methodology.
“Hasn’t there been research done to determine how to reduce the possibility of reduction?”
There has been very little, with some in process now, but from what I’ve read nothing has been found to be effective so far. Indeed, the previous solution, excess copper fining, has proved totally ineffective. In some cases, possibly even oxidative, if I understand correctly. Dr. Alan Limmer suggested once, with tongue somewhere in cheek, that reduction of reduction might come when fermentation could take place without yeast.
Alan Limmer (PHD in chemistry and a winemaker) has laid down the chemistry for the sulphide reduction process in several ‘peer reviewed’ papers dating from around 2004-2006, including a viable reduction mechanism. Basically he shows there has been no way to accurately measure the redox potential of any wine, so as to predict what degree of sulphide reduction will or won’t occur. He predicted that copper sulphate would not work either. Limmer’s chemistry has not been challenged as incorrect or refined to my knowledge, so it still holds. Indeed, a lot of independent research seems to have confirmed he was right on even his most speculative points.
On the other side you have, Tyson Stelzer, a high school science teacher, AWRI’s Peter Godden, who only has an MBA, and members of the New Zealand Screw Cap Initiative who, as a group, have proposed the main solutions for sulphide reduction under screw cap under a theory they call ‘sulphide equilibrium.’ None of their work was peer reviewed, indeed much of AWRI’s oft sited research hasn’t been peer reviewed either. To my knowledge most SC proponents have blindly followed these expert’s lead believing in what is basically imaginary chemistry. These same experts have also pushed a false impression that corks are 1000-1227 fold variable, based on misinterpretation of MOCON data (in the face of evidence to the contrary). This incorrect impression, which other AWRI scientists have since admitted is wildly wrong, has been countered by better informed, peer reviewed, clinical studies that have shown that corks are around 2 fold variable compared to SC–so close as to make little difference. Unfortunately, most pro-SC journalists shamelessly continue to use these incorrect figures to paint cork as wildly oxidative. I know a lot of journalists and wine writers who should hand in their press cards given this unethical behavior. I know others that just ought to be lined up against a wall and shot.
What Tim raises is a different issue. There is a need for ‘end user’ research showing what closures deliver after transport and under various storage conditions. Corks and synthetics, being internal, are more robust and won’t suffer oxidation from getting knocked about like SC. On the other hand, SC don’t suffer the piston effect that corks can. I’d like to see solid real world figures for both, before we draw too many conclusions here. Anyone using MOCON data better be damned sure they know exactly what they are talking about and understand the strengths and weaknesses of what MOCON can and can’t predict. So, I’d have to look at Gibbson’s research, sited by Tim, in light of this and other recent closure research.
“Also, I’m not sure how heavy metals factor into the Stelvin closure. There’s a liner between the wine and the cap. Are you suggesting heavy metals are in the liner?”
The heavy metal, copper sulphate is put into the wine to slow advent of reduction, so isn’t drawn out of the liner. Last year’s International Wine and Spirits Competition threw out a considerable number of SC wines from 3 New World countries because they had illegal levels of copper sulphate. I was told repeatedly last year, 2 and 3 years ago that this practice had ended. Clearly this practice is and has been widespread in Australia and NZ for years. If I recall correctly, Cowey’s AWRI study showed a shelf survey of Shirazes that averaged at or over the US legal limit–.5ppm. One NZ university offered a $25000 scholarship to study copper sulphate damage to wine post bottling. Why, on the oft chance it might provide better deny-ability? To flaunt US and EU regulations? Clearly, the practice continues, and where copper additions are being reduced, sulphide reduction will appear quicker and more intensively under SC than it has over last few years. Oxygen is the only solution to this problem.
“Finally, I don’t think when it comes to high quality Stelvin closures that they are any cheaper than corks. There are many types of corks, and there are many types of screw caps. I’ve found the composite corks tend to have a glue smell when I pop open a wine bottle, though it’s not noticeable once the wine is poured. With other cheap corks, anecdotally, I find a higher incidence of corked wines. While the best, most carefully selected corks do the best job, they probably aren’t worth the cost for everyday wines.”
That is incorrect from what I know. Although price differences between all the grades of cork, synthetics, vino-loks, zorks and corks do range wildly from top to bottom. With natural cork, Diams, vino-loks sitting at the high end vs plastics/synthetics (by far cheapest), SC close to this and low end agglomerates just above at bottom levels. I don’t know prices in US, but the figues I’ve been quoted Australia a good cork will cost $1.5, a cheap natural cork .60-80 and SC around .18. (John, I think you are wrong on Diams, they run about a buck or so a piece in NZ.)
Sadly, one problem is that the residue of small, unreformed cork producers are dumping their untreated cork at price levels that compete with plastics. This is because they can’t sell them anywhere else (they’ll eventually die off or get swallowed up by big producers). I saw this in Argentina recently, where wine producers seemed oblivious to the quality arguments surrounding closures and are totally focused on what’s cheapest. Synthetics seem to dominate South American wines for that reason alone.
There is no doubt that big companies with high volumes are getting SC down to tiny prices. Take a big company like Penfolds, Constellation or Pernaud-Ricard and you are more often talking a buck a bottle savings every year over last 8 or 9 years. We are talking millions and millions of dollars in windfall profits. That’s big money. And a lot of that money has been plowed back into flying ‘sympathetic’ journalist, sommelliers and wine buyers (usually business class) from UK, Scandinavia, US and (now) China, every year to Australia and New Zealand for events or wine tours. That incentive buys a lot of good will, not to mention, silence from journalists.
Whereas the cork lobby is always getting nailed for it’s huge PR budget, most journalists give the well financed war chest of the SC PR lobby a free ride.
“In any case, this is what I think is one of the biggest risks for winery principals who decide to go the SC route as they are configured today (when Tim’s oxygen-permeable liners are online it will be a most welcome turn of events), as I would be willing to bet the cellar that 95% of consumers and a hefty percentage of wine journalists could not even spot a wine suffering from reduction. They will simply tell you they don’t like the wine and conclude that Winery X makes crappy sauvignon blanc and never buy it again- without ever asking why the wine is the way it is.
I teach an ‘intro to wine tasting’ course for 2 hours every week for last decade. 20 average people, 12 wines (almost all SC) all tasted blind, good wines from ‘relaible’ competent wine makers–none of these wines were bottled dirty. The students write a group note and their descriptives have a common ‘reductive’ trend that runs through most wines. A raise of hand at end suggests the satisfaction rate with these wines is low amongst these consumers. From a teaching perspective it is a nightmare. Compared to pre-2001, buying a wine and having it show predictable varietal characters is a lottery at best. Viognier, riesling, gewurztraminers lose their aromatic profile much, much faster under SC than any other closure. They tighten up quickly on the palate as well and don’t unwind with airing quickly enough to show their best. We are told the opposite is the case. When I explain what is probably going on to my students they relate similar instances. I’ve had two different students, several years apart suddenly click on my explanation of sulphide reduction: “oh, that’s why I stopped buying Craggy Range Chardonnay. It used to be my favorite.”
What I smell–more importantly don’t smell–and my students smell, suggests there are huge issues no one is confronting here. I agree with John that the big elephant in the room with Australia’s downfall is SC. And with NZ wines, I suspect the reason they have never taken off as quality wine with prices to match is related to SC too. Not for aesthetic and romantic reasons, although they contribute, but because the wines don’t show their true potential now or as well as they did in the past.
“Certainly at a big Penfold’s Press event about 18 months or so ago in NY, I was the only journalist who spotted a badly reduced bottle of riesling from the most recently released vintage (sealed under SC)- the winemaker who was in attendance readily acknowledged that the wine was badly reduced. When we had the 1999 vintage of the same wine out of magnum and sealed under natural cork, it was simply singing and a really fine bottle. Several journalists commented to me privately “that it is a shame Penfold’s no longer makes riesling of the same quality level as they did back in 1999!”
This is my experience too. I had a similar experience with winemaker Phil Laffer of Steingarten fame when I nailed his 2004 (I think) as having serious sulphide problems. He admitted I was right and they had lost several earlier vintages to that problem, so bad they didnt’ release several years–indeed, the original SCed 1999 Richmond Grove riesling that started the ‘revolution’ succumbed to similar problems. He told me he had taken the same wine around a dozen Kiwi wine writers and not one had identified the problem he new he had. His explanation then was they had licked the problem now with new fruitier yeast strains. I’d like to see those wines now. The fixes and excuses I’ve heard from SC lobby since 2001 have been as lame as what we all heard from cork industry pre-2001. A little honesty and an apology or two wouldn’t hurt their cause. The cork industry has taken that tactic since 2003 or so and it has helped them.
Sorry, run out of time. Gotta go. Will try to get back again next week if time permits. Paul White.
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yah know, it’s hard to beat 200 plus years. Not bad for dirty old tree bark at the bottom of the ocean.
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Hi Larry,
Sorry to have missed the question about Steve Edmunds in your last post. No, Steve was not at our tasting here in NY, but we did chat about my experiences with his SC-sealed wines after the tasting, as I wrote an historical feature on his winery in the last issue of my newsletter. I promised him a care package containing copies of several of the scientific papers that I have in the files, but have not had time to dig them out and post them to him as of yet. And sorry for mischaracterizing the conversations at the tasting regarding the Heart of Gold- I would certainly trust Dale’s memory on this more than mine, as I was running around to get food on the table and trying to also get precise notes on the wines at the same time.
In terms of scientific studies on reduction and closures, I was happy to see Paul’s observation that their are some clinical trials in this regard ongoing- I look forward to the results. In the meantime, maybe during this year’s bottling you could set aside a dozen bottles each under SC and Cork of the same wine and just see what happens over the ensuing 18-24 months? It might be very interesting, and while probably a small sample, it would be a vast improvement over my anecdotal experiences with the ESJ Gamay bottlings.
All the Best,
John
Lots of great points there Paul.
I will be the FIRST to acknowlege that the chemistry involved here is more complex than the logic I presented in my earlier post.
The problem with oxidative wine chemistry is that is is SO variable that there are really no absoultes. As a winemaker I have learned that lesson the hard way more times than I care to admit.
This is why Nomacorc et al are doing this huge research initiative into wine oxygen. The problem however is that again, from my winemaking experience, very little of what “works” for someone else’s wine is likely to apply to mine.
So my approach is by definition (and by necessity ) over-simplistic. This is an important component of wine quality that we haven’t really had influence over before as winemakers, and given the tool I hope to hand to my colleagues, they are going to have to learn how best to use it within the context of their own wines.
So don’t think that I am saying that I know everything about these chemistries. I probably know more than most, but it is one of those things where the more you “know”, it only serves to highlight how very little you “understand”.
We are looking into a dense fog of possibilities. What I am proposing is that instead of just throwing up our hands, that that we drop an anchor in the common-sense location I defined above, and then by judging how far away we get from that marker, if our wines are betting better or worse, we know which direction to head.
I think my range is a very good starting point, but it will be spot-on for very very few individual wines.
In regards to the proponents of one closure or another, I think all the comments above are valid. It reminds me of the stuff I hate the most in politics - both sides point to their benefits and downplay their weaknesses - often at the expense of admitting the problems and solving them. .
The main stickler is really if you think that the TCA issue is worse than the reduction issue. - That is only a matter of opinion, but if you look at the same competition data, you see that oxidation and reduction problems in those competitions are together larger than TCA. - and those problems cannot be pinned on the alternatives presented there. I think that TCA + inconsistancy is worse than oxidation or reduction by itself, but it drives me insane to think that I have to accept the choice between a number of flawed options.
The entire point of my company is to make sure that we just don’t have to accept this fools’ choice. As a winemaker, laboring for a year or two to craft a wine and then rolling the dice with the closure just makes me angry - and since nobody else was fixing the problem, I decided that I would do something about it, filed a few patents, and raised some money to get it done.
Of course, it has not proven to be simple, and I think that I have found out WHY it hadn’t been done before: The inability to really measure in-bottle oxygen very well.
The Mocon data is very certainly questionable because it doesn’t reflect real-world conditions. (dry corks) And the orbisphere method cannot really pick up the variability because you can only test each package once as the probe pierces the package.
Quite luckily for me, just after I started down this road, a new class of instruments came on the market that allow non-destructive in-package oxygen measurement - essentially by shining light onto a luminescent dot that glows back to the instrument in proportion to how much oxygen is in the container. The meter we used is called a PreSens and it allows me to measure differences in oxygen down to 1 part per billion.
This has allowed me to test candidate materials, different configurations and hone in on the performance I want - all much faster than could be done any other way.
Of course, we STILL can’t test this with real wine, because wine will eat the oxygen that enters the bottle, so we have devised a non-reducing model wine that has the same alcohol and pH as an “average” wine but will not absorb oxygen.
So there is a long road ahead of us. And all of the intricacies in this argument are very real - which is why I have always felt that the best road is not to provide a “solution” but rather a tool that each winemaker can use as s/he sees fit. Along the way we are going to learn a LOT about what happens to a wine over time, and that will hopefully guide us out of the fog at some point so that we can stop talking about the wine closure and focus on the nectar inside… and maybe what we are going to do to our spouses after the bottle is empty… ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
More press on this subject:
http://www.decanter.com/news/300318.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I know, right? I mean…
Sorry, run out of time. Gotta go. Will try to get back again next week if time permits.
What if he’d been able to really write at length?? ![[basic-smile.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/83717c74df9b0ce202453063bc4f11baf0ee6b8a.gif "smile"){kind=small}