Yes, a marketing meeting when someone says 'I know, instead of the boring old screw cap, let’s strip sheets of bark from trees, cut plugs from the sheets of bark, and somehow stuff them into the bottles! People will love it!
John Gilman as marketing executive.
OK I thought this was noteworthy:
Not sexy? Hello, they’re called SCREWcaps aren’t they?!?
But this was positively zen-like.
All that needs to happen is for it to happen
That’s literature right there. ![[welldone.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/fc9709a841aa9379fd892a9cf0b535b05f473b86.gif "[welldone.gif]"){kind=small}
As far as which closure is worse on the floor - not for nothing guys, but who leaves them on the floor? That’s a commitment to the lifestyle for sure!
Corks and bottle tops and bottles and glasses and cheese doodles all over the floor - really gotta watch your step when you grab your rifle to go out back to shoot squirrels.
I think he was kidding.
I agree with Todd Hamina above. What screw caps lack is not their ability to be an effective closure for wine. They lack the ability to hold the memory of a wine, and in turn they don’t always do justice to the craft that goes into the bottle.
I’ve kept the corks of special bottles that I’ve had with special people. You can write the occasion on it and have it as a keepsake. Even if it’s not a special occasion wine, it’s cool to have corks of your favorite producers. The logos are like little pieces of art.
A screwcap to me says commodity or disposible. There’s not really any practicality to begin with buying expensive wine, so to me the aesthetics of the experience are a key part of the equation, and for that reason it’s worth it to me to put up with the occasional corked bottle.
Suitable alternatives to me are Diam or glass tops. I’m open to alternatives that can appeal to my sense of aesthetics, but screw caps just aren’t there for me on wines I buy to cellar.
To me, a bottle of wine is like a concert ticket. It can be anything from a mind-blowing experience to an absolute trainwreck. But I like to keep my ‘ticket stubs.’ Call me old-fashioned, naive, or idealistic. It’s just one man’s opinion.
As far as I’m concerned, if I need a cork, or a tasting note for that matter, to remember a wine, it was probably not worth remembering.
I never see any of that messy stuff anyway, the butler serves us from a decanter.
P Hickner
Larry, if you were a larger producer, how much cost would it add to bottle some of your better wines under both closures? Say Ridge bottled an eighth, a quarter, or half of their Monte Bello using screwcaps.
At that price point, would the added cost of doing it both ways be material in any way?
But then, you have the question of how do you sell the two types of bottle as futures, wine club, retail and restaurant. That might be more the issue than the cost.
Chris,
The question I need to ask is why would I consider this, even if I was a large producer? I do not want to bottle my wines under cork for the reasons I’ve previously mentioned, nor do I want to use DIAM’s at the present time.
Can larger producers do this fairly easily? Depends. For those who have their own bottling lines, if they are currently not bottling any wines under screwcap, they would need to invest in the apparatus for their bottling line in order to do so - or use a mobile bottling line for this. They would need to order separate glass - and in some cases, glass shapes that are used for cork finished are not available for screw cap finishes.
Larger wineries would certainly have the capability of ‘moving’ these wines, either via their wine club or via special offers to retailers, etc.
To me, this issue goes far beyond the cost of the closure and bottling itself - it really involves ‘maintaining the integrity’ of what I spend months or years creating . . . and to me, there’s no better way to do that than with screw caps.
And Matt, I hear ya - next time you open a special bottle, just grab the matchbook from the restaurant and write them info on there 
Cheers!
I guess what I’m thinking of is a winery who comes to believe that screwcaps are better than corks, but is unsure what customer reaction is going to be. So maybe they make some cork and some screwcap, both to hedge their bets and not to lose customers who only want cork, but maybe also as an experiment to see whether customers really care that much and, to the extent they do, which closure they prefer. After doing that for a few years, maybe they can be confident about what direction to go into the medium and longer term.
I’d certainly love to see it - hopefully, customers would be good with the screwcap versions and it would help pave the way for more producers to go that route. Plus, it would increase the number of data points out there to show how well wines do under screwcap, including with age.
But I don’t really see it happening yet, at least outside of Australia and with enough wines with price/prestige to drive the point home.
And one of the main reasons you will not see it in this country is that the screw cap producers, especially Stelvin, have never done what happened in Australia back in the day - put winemakers up front and center in their marketing, explaining the reasons why they use screwcaps. Once that happened over there, the wineries and consumers never looked back . . .
That is old school. It’s also not a good reason to hold back an industry.
I wonder if my friend kept the cork from the magnum of 1945 Latour that he spent months and thousands of dollars running down for the joy of sharing it with good friends on a special night. It would help him remember that how he felt like he’d been stabbed in the gut when he discovered that it was corked. I know I don’t need the cork to remember the terrible look on his face.
Screwcapped wines can have closure failure too, just not so much with TCA.
My Goldens love to chew on corks! How can I deprive them of that?
I totally think he was kidding, but maybe Chuck was too, and the subtlety of his dry wit escaped us.
I’ll bet your friend doesn’t prefer cork for the “romance” after that. I can’t understand why anyone who has opened a lot of old bottles or collects and ages wine would still prefer cork over a much more consistent alternative. I actually can’t understand why anyone would. This type of reasoning, which I’ve seen from other people too, equates to “I like a significant portion of wine, which increases drastically with older wine, to be ruined because I refuse to accept new technology.”
Todd,
Totally agree - there are always chances that screw caps will ‘fail’ as well. If you knock the bottle on the cap, you can create cracks, which can allow increased amounts of oxygen in and out, thus oxidizing the wine; If you stack more than 3 pallets on top of each other, there is a chance that the top will be ‘compromised’, again leading to oxidation; you can have issues on the bottling line where the caps are not applied ‘correctly’ (this may lead to simply cosmetic issues or worse).
That said, we know that this closure will not lead to the presence of TCA in the wine (two notes: 1) Yes, a wine under screwcap can still be ‘corked’, but in that case, there is a ‘systemic’ issue with the wine not caused by the closure and 2) The cork industry is improving things radically, and is FINALLY selectively offering a money back guarantee for wines that are found to be ‘corked’, though I can’t wait to see how they will actually deal with this). Also, we know that, unless the situations above occur, which are quite rare, you will not have ‘random oxidation’ or ‘inconsistent oxidation rates’ as you do with natural corks.
And the conversation continues . . .
Doug - I think it is because by nature, humans are a conservative lot. It’s helped us survive over the eons. Today “conservative” has connotations regarding politics, but that’s a shame.
If you knew that berries from the plant nearby were good, you would keep eating them and probably wouldn’t try those funny things that popped up nearby. One day some adventurous soul tried those toadstools and you watched him get sick and die. So you never tried them. Eventually, there would be another outlier who would try some similar things except those turned out to be tasty and because of the chance he took, you all found a new kind of edible mushroom.
Obviously that’s simplistic but the people who are willing to try something that differs from what they are used to have always been in the minority.
Wine, for many, if not most, Americans today, has emotional resonance. It’s not like most Americans grew up on farms and drank whatever grandpa was making. There’s a mix of brand awareness, self-identification, Veblen status, education, context, memory, and a host of other things that make it something other than just a drink with dinner. Those things make people seek it out, write TNs, and participate on boards like this.
And emotions are what control us to a large extent. It’s why people fight for religious reasons - there’s no practical justification.
I think that drives a lot of the reluctance to adopt the practical expedient of screw caps and Matt illustrated it perfectly. Logic doesn’t enter the picture. It’s about everything else. And it requires giving up one’s comfort zone.
It’s why I applaud guys like Larry - only through dogged persistence will we finally get to a point where the emotional resonance of a package is non-existent.
Matt,
Each to his own, but I would say that the failure rate of cork betrays the craft that goes into the bottle, it doesn’t do justice to it.
I had a beautiful 2004 Pinot Noir on Friday under screw cap. It had the right colour, the right flavors (for a wine of it’s age). The risks of cork just don’t justify the few benefits.