The few times I have tried saran wrap, I thought it diminished or took away my TCA perception, but I have never had a control wine to compare if the wine was different to a non infected bottle.
Not great knowledge on my part but I’ll bring this up on both threads (Maybe Marcus or Jim Anderson can comment) but what about the DIAM cork? Natural cork and no TCA.
Jason
I love Diam for the “no TCA” bit, but it is hardly natural.
Sure, it contains cork, but the cork is ground, processed, and stuck together with a polyurethane glue. Ah, I just noticed there is an eco-friendly version now that uses a binder based on bees wax, but with all the processing can it really be called natural?
Given the environmental impact of glass bottles (shipping weight, dwindling opportunities to recycle, etc.) the corks/capsules are a blip.
Organic viticulture and dry farming are very good things. People who think that using a different closure on wine is any kind of game changer, or even remotely meaningful, is fooling themselves.
Completely disagree. That’s the same arguement people make when they litter at the beach. “It’s just a can, what impact does it really have?” It adds up quickly.
So use a faulty closure because you feel better about your pointless impact?
Has anyone ever looked at the energy consumption associated with natural corks vs. Diam vs. synthetics vs. screwcaps and compared it to that of the bottles, shipping, varying farming practices, etc.?
“Pointless impact”! Ha! I do love your intensity.
I agree with your point, but no one knows which closure has more environmental impact when faulty bottles (thus another bottle getting opened and all of the impact that goes with that) and capsules are taken into account. The study funded by the cork industry conveniently ignored those factors. Plus the industry lies about the rates of cork failure and cork taint, so their numbers would be skewed even if they did account for replacement bottles.
And with DIAM and other alternatives besides screwcap, we’re back to wondering about long term performance. Compromised wine doesn’t help anything.
I can recycle screw caps.
I wonder if they actually get recycled, though. I think if you’re putting them into a single sort recycling system, they’re probably so small that most/all get discarded rather than recycled. Based on what I’ve heard about the sorting in those systems, that would be the case. Are there accessible, dedicated recycling services for screwcaps?
Last time my taint was smelled I was told it was corked.
Fevre has began testing (internally) with Diam starting in 2002. They began using them on their Petit Chablis in 2004 and onward, Chablis in 2005, 1er crus in 2007, and Grand Cru in 2010 (some in 2009 apparently). So there is good data on their long term performance. Nice thing about Chablis is it’s transparent to any flavors/etc caused by the cork. I’ve had a fair number of Fevres closed with diams, 1er & Grand cru ranging from 5-10 years post vintage, and unlike their terrible era with corks these all showed well without any premox, tca or other taints. I’m still holding onto a decent number of 2010s to see how they age.
Eric,
Great information - but, of course, this is just one small series of data points. I’m being a bit of a ‘ball buster’ here, but if folks are going to continue to say ‘show me that screw cap wines can age’ and there is plenty of anecdotal info that they can, then other closures should be ‘scrutinized’ in the same manner, right?
Congrats on all of the recent placements you’ve been getting, my friend!!!
Cheers.
I think the corkscrew industry is behind the pro-cork news. 
If everyone who opened a corked bottle, or one oxidised due to the cork, discarded it and opened another, that would make a significant change to the environmental impact of screwcaps vs corks. However I suspect most faulty bottles just get drunk anyway.
Using carbon footprint data from Jamie Goode, I looked at the numbers involved here on my blog
Thus, in terms of carbon at least, the environmental choice between screwcap and cork depends on who is deciding. Most producers would clearly do better to chose cork. But if you are a wine drinker that would open another bottle on finding a faulty wine, as I suspect most of us are, or a producer that caters for the likes of us, the decision is less clear cut.
Thanks for that. I know you’re correct that a lot of faulty bottles get consumed anyway. Those numbers, rough as they are, at least show that the cost of replacement in terms of CO2 is very significant. I think it’s important to note that cork taint isn’t the only type of problem with corks. I see cork failure pretty regularly, where the cork seems intact but a young wine is oxidized because that cork didn’t do its job. I do think a lot of consumers will notice a problem like that even if they don’t know exactly what it is. Many will not, but many will. The people drinking wine most often are probably most likely to know when something is wrong, too, so that might increase the chances of bad bottles being identified as such. So, if cork taint is somewhere around 3-5%, and there’s also a not-insignificant percentage of oxidized bottles from failed corks, we’re talking about quite a few bad bottles. Beyond the failed corks that don’t cause visible seepage, I regularly find (at my workplace) seeping bottles with failed corks. Those never make it to an end consumer, yet the resources that went into producing and shipping them have been spent and wasted. We’ll probably never know for sure, but I think we can say that the answer there is not obvious, despite a strong campaign of misinformation from the cork industry.
No, you really can’t. You might find somewhere that might claim to recycle them, but the reality is they will all end up in a landfill, or floating around in the sea.
Indeed, it’s an individual decision, and one which would depend on ones personal experience with cork. I am always surprised by some of the numbers I see quoted by people, such as this one:
I think if my percentage of bad bottles was anywhere close to 5% I’d just stop buying wine and find another hobby. I’d say for me it’s probably about one in a hundred. And I probably drink the bottle anyway in half those cases, since often the TCA problem is only minor. On the rare occasions I get a couple of bad ones from the same producer, I just stop buying from them. But looking at data from my last few issues of Decanter, it looks like the rate of faulty bottles in most of the tastings is quite a bit less than 1%, so I very much doubt I’m an outlier.
Everybody agrees that they do, But nobody agrees that they age in the same way. Every single blind tasting I’ve seen has found a clear and noticeable difference between cork-aged bottles and screw cap bottles. In some cases the screw cap has been judged better, e.g.
https://www.cellartracker.com/event.asp?iEvent=13650
and in others the cork, e.g.
I’m all for myth-busting, but let’s not pretend that a cork-aged wine and a screw-cap aged wine will be identical, assuming no cork failure. I’m still not ready to take the risk on a case of screwcap Chateau Margaux. I’d rather see the cork industry solve the problem, which it seems they are endeavoring to do, rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater and end up with a wine I didn’t bargain on in 30 years.
OK. But that’s also where all the wine bottles end up. No recycling here on those.
I just cannot get hung up on the cork.
Did a 7,000 cork trial with Amorim last year and bumped up to 22,000 this year. Everything else is Diam (since 2014 vintage). Have not had issues to date with Diam. No sense the wines are aging in an advanced manner (of course they have only been in the bottle 3 years). Would like to use Amorim. They’re expensive. Double and more the cost of Diam 30 (which we use for almost all the wines). More than $1/cork.