Corks do not breathe...

What are your thoughts?

Right on!

The comments, with evidence, make it clear the article, written without evidence, is, well, bullshit.

But, but, have you ever seen a cork actually breathing? Come on, get real…

If I read that article correctly, unless a cork is faulty and let’s oxygen in, wine will last forever in the bottle.

There must be a lot of faulty corks in the world.

Well…I don’t care much for his article because of its tone of condecension.
However…as for the “evidence”…it exists…Dick just doesn’t bother to cite it.
This is pretty much the same thing I said in an article that appeared in WineSpectator (or Wines&Vines) back in
the late '70’s. And I did, in fact, cite the evidence. In the Amerine&Joslyn textbook on winemaking, they cite
a study (from around the '40’s-'50’s) that actually measured the diffusion rate of O2 thru a cork. The diffusion rate was so
slow that it would take some 25+ yrs for the amount of O2 to diffuse thru the cork to equal the usual headspace in a 750
blt of wine. 25+yrs. Maybe a repeat study, w/ more modern technology, would come to a different conclusion, but I doubt it.
That being said, it should be emphasized that a cork is an imperfect closure…they leak. The seal betwixt btl and cork is not always
perfect. Cork is a “natural” product. It can have defects & imperfections. It can lose its resiliency. And that is why you can take two
identically stored btls of a 20-30-40 yr old wine and there will (usually) be significant differences in the wine.
As for old wines turning the vinegear in the btl…it just doesn’t happen. Would everybody raise their hand who has encountered
a btl of wine that has turned to vinegear in the btl??? Louder…I can’t hear you!!
The only way a wine can turn to vinegar is if it was btld w/ acetobacter present. And, yes, those I’ve encountered (thank you Tony Coturri).
But it’s damnably tough to make vinegar. You have to have active/alive/growing acetobacter population around, plus an easy access of the wine to O2.
That just doesn’t happen in the reductive conditions of a btld wine. I’ve had btls of wine that have had 1/3’rd to over half the wine ullaged away. And never/ever
once has the wine, that I can recall, been vinegar. Bad stuff, often w/ acetaldhydes present, but never/ever vinegar.
Good grief…do the experiment, folks. Take a half-opened btl of wine and leave it on your counter standing upriight, exposed to air, for a yr or two.
What you get will not be good…but it’s not agonna be vinegar. Unless you happen to have living acetobacter hanging around in you kitchen…which I do.
I have three magnums of actively growing vinegar (from a mother given me by EmilioCastelli that dates back to his granparents in the LakeGarda
area in the late 1800’s). I can smell the vinegar when I bend over the btls. Even then, I’ll leave partially consumed btls open several feet away for a week
or two…and the don’t turn to vinegar. Vinegar (good vinegar, that is) is not easy stuff to make.
One of the things that Dick is railing against is many of these “myths” we pick up as we are learning about wine. I learned many of these same myths.
We read in a book, written by some “authority”, that you must do such & such about wine. Most often, these myths are simply the same tired ones that
are repeated over & over by these same “authorities” and taken as fact and never questioned. Alas…people seem so reluctant to question what these
“authorities” pronounce as “truth”.
Tom

Actually, my own view is that the author describes things quite well. The bullshit is the “conventional wisdom” that “breathing corks” are what creates nicely aged wine.

Yup…therein lies the problem, Thomas. See my rant just above. We all know that wine doesn’t last
forever in the btl. All wine, when it’s put into the btl, contains dissolved O2. And even if you hermetically
seal the wine in the btl, this dissolved O2 will eventually take down the wine.
Tom

Yes, Tom, I wondered about that dissolved O2 doing its work that was never mentioned in what really is a disgusting article if the writer was trying to teach people something. Condescension is a mild way of saying how the article reads to me.

May I ask, according to the study you (and he) cite, is that 25+ years duration valid if a cork is perfectly sealed and the wine is perfectly stored so as not to deteriorate that seal?

Seems to me that such a study is almost a call for a new closure.

Hmm, I think this is another bit of conventional wisdom that does not hold up. I don’t have any references, but I have to believe whatever oxygen is in a freshly bottled wine is fairly quickly used up in whatever reactions it’s going to be involved in. After that, the aging reactions taking place shouldn’t involve O2 (unless, as you point out, there is an easy path through the cork for fresh O2 to get in).

I’ve read about a couple of studies that completely contradict Dr. Richardson’s claim. Amorim did one (I can’t find it right now, but it was pointed out to me when I mistakenly made the assertion that there’s zero oxygen transmission with the best natural cork) and there’s reference to another one here: http://www.nzic.org.nz/CiNZ/articles/Limmer_69_3.pdf. This guy has written several such articles and I can’t find his study or any citation of it. There are some knowledgable, bright people who also don’t know where he comes up with this stuff who commented after another such article here: Reader Feedback. Dr. Richardson chose not to respond to any of them.

Here’s the post where I was corrected:

Richard Grant Peterson seems to be full of it.

Thomas,
I don’t recall the details of the material that Amerine&Joslyn (TableWines: The Technology of Their Production, 1970) cite but, as I recall,
that measurement of the diffusion rate was measured in a lab aparatus, not in a cork sealing a wine btl. Alas, you/I/and wine don’t live
in a perfect world and therein is the big problem.
Like you, I very much dislike the tenor of the article. Having met & visited w/ DickPeterson several times over the yrs, this article doesn’t
reflect the real DickPeterson. His statement “Show me a cork that breathes…and I’ll show you a btl of vinegar” is just dead wrong and I’m sure
Dick knows that as well.
Tom

There were various discussions of this back on eBob. Certainly corks let some air through, but the amount varies depending on the cork. IIRC Stelvin seems to be more controllable/predictable.

I always come back to the simple principle of conservation of mass If a cork is letting air in, something has to be going out the other direction to balance the pressure in the bottle. Water and ethanol are the two largest components inside the bottle (by at least an order of magnitude). If air is getting in, water (and probably ethanol) have to be getting out to make room. Any bottle that lets in a significant amount of air over time should show that by increased ullage.

Not necessarily. The air coming in (with higher oxygen content) could just replace the air already in there, which has had some of its oxygen used up by reactions with the wine. That way the wine continues to oxygenate, slowly. Something else has to come out of course (CO2?).

Good point, and a possibility. But given that the head space is probably 99.9% water and ethanol vapor, it seems to me the most likely scenario is that water is the compound that would be most likely to escape outwards.

Seems to me that it must be two way transport for air, and one way for water and ethanol due to higher vapor pressure inside the bottle.
The original article would be more valuable if it had just focused on the desirability of keeping wine in the bottle free of oxygen intrusion.

P Hickner

Keep in mind that H2O and ETOH are nearly completely miscible so that there is not water and alcohol in the bottle but rather a solution of alcohol and water, likewise the vapor in the headspace
would be a gaseous diffusion of both water and alcohol. So, whatever gas escapes through or past the cork would contain both water and alcohol. Also, I’d wonder about the capillary action of the wine around the small space between the cork and the glass of the inside of the neck of the bottle, would some small amount of liquid move up the cork over time via capillary action (adhesion)?

I wonder if the vapor pressure of the alcohol in solution would be different that that of the water so that the alcohol evaporates more readily? I’d assume not, but I’m not a physical chemist…

Well if a perfect closure and perfect cork will not breath, but if there is no perfect cork, wouldn’t this be a reasonable conclusion?

The question in my mind then is this: Can a screwcap be perfect?