OK - probably a newbie question so excuse me upfront. I just received an allocation shipment from a well known vineyard. All six bottles (5 different types of wine) had no capsule or foil wrapper protecting the cork. The top of the bare cork was exposed to the air. I have never seen this. I am thinking a bottling error but across 5 different varieties (white / red)? I have purchased hundreds of bottle at retail and never seen this.
Is this an issue for the longer term storage (>3 years)?
Many wineries go without a capsule. You could probably start a 10 page thread on whether one is necessary (if there is not one already). I say not. The capsule does not keep out air - the cork does that (mostly). The capsule protects the cork from dirt, dust etc. Not a problem in most cellars.
I don’t capsule most of the white wines that I make under the Matello label. For long term storage, I have opened up bottles back to 2006 with no noticeable difference between capsuled or not.
I do still use capsules for most of the Goodfellow Family Cellars wines, but that is simply because I hope you will age the wines. If I am asking you to look at the bottle 25 times before you drink it, I feel the bottle should have a nice appearance too.
I help with bottling for a bunch of wineries in the urban Bay Area and I’d say at least half of them bottle some or all of their wines without capsules. I’ve seen more and more wineries do this in recent years, as the capsules serve little to no useful purpose as far as I can tell.
The only functional purpose of foils is to keep wood (and cork) boring insects from eating through your corks (and ruining your wine once they get through). Buildings are now, hopefully, well protected from such pests of course. Other than that, foils are purely aesthetic.
Unfortunately, tin mining can be extremely environmentally unfriendly (some good guys in the biz fortunately, some bad)…so I switched to the no-foil look. Since, imo, foils don’t have a functional purpose it’s better to save the tin for other/better things. I looked at the alternatives, but decided no-foil was the way to go (non-tin foils don’t look that nice, and many/most folks hate waxed bottles).
I see the capsules as a final sealing from the producer.
If broken (removed), its easier to refill bottle, and sell again.
Imagine if old/expensive wine wasn’t capsuled… I would never buy an oldie at a restaurant with capsule missing. (Even Rudy et al, had big trouble finding correct ones, and they were wrinkled and twisted after he tried to fit them back on).
Older Rioja top versions went to extremes by wrapping the hole bottle in metal-wire to avoid fraud in the smaller restaurants, -like serving the Grand Reserva several times, just refilled w. normal wine.
I even hope that producers will make it harder to counterfeit capsules in the future. (perhaps by adding extra seal components in the caps.)
Soren, you bring up an interesting point about counterfeiting. That said, counterfeit-worthy bottles represent what, well less than 1% of wines?
If a capsule has to be a component of counterfeit prevention, then so be it I guess, but I’d rather eliminate the capsules for all the others. As Eric says, tin mining is terrible on the environment, and it’s not like this little thing of ours is good for the environment to begin with. Anything that can help better that is a step worth taking.
Mining for any metals/minerals, is not a good thing for the enviroment, for sure !
I am happy that the lead caps is now forbidden. (Harmfull in all aspects).
But today, capsules can be made of a variety of other materials (also non-metallic, even organic seals can be made).
There are many examples of counterfeiting the more “normal priced” wines for sale in restaurants, with huge profits to be made. Fraud can be seen in all better bottles, not just the 1% collectors items.
As a guy that works in mining and environmental protection, I would suggest to everyone that I suspect the general impression of mining and its environmental impacts are worse than the reality. Some sectors are better or worse than others though I am sure and I am not familiar with tin mining.
"The counterfeit wine labelled as Jacob’s Creek can be identified by a spelling mistake on the lower bottom back label on the imitation packaging; underneath ‘South Eastern Australia,’ the ‘Wine of Australia’ text is missing an ‘A’ in Australia and instead it reads ‘Wine of Austlia’.
If you’re counterfeiting medium priced wine, you have to mass produce to earn enough profit to make it worthwhile. I doubt it’s much harder to come up with suitable foils than labels. It may be more difficult to come up with branded foils, but generic foils may still fool many purchasers (and many medium priced wines do not have branded foils). Note that the Jacob’s Creek example had mistakes in the labels, probably as easy to identify as any difference in foils.
If you’re counterfeiting older and rarer wine, the issue with foils is more important.
I totally agree with Michael M, wax is not big deal, just screw right through it and remove chips or dust from the bottle top just before pulling the last portion of the cork out–easy to do.
You can also wrap the corkscrew and bottle top in a towel to reduce the spread of initial wax penetration, if necessary.
With some waxes, you can run some hot water on the wax and you can even peal it right off with no mess at all–Dunn Howells for example. Conversely, cold wax fractures and spreads more.