I have no perspective or experience with this, but it seems to me the additional air barrier would cause wax sealed bottles to age more slowly than others. Any thoughts?
they neither effect it nor affect it.
YyitsMnyY1s
This makes sense to me too. The whole theory is cork allows for small exchanges of gas that results in aging. Wax would seal the cork so those exchanges can’t happen.
What theory?
It’s not what happens. Wine aging isn’t because of some air exchange through the cork. Besides, wax isn’t necessarily impermeable and you can manufacture wax to allow more or less air.
As I get older I like wax on corks less and less
What makes you think that? Even with the best of corks, the seal is not perfectly airtight. Some oxygen always slips in and that certainly affects the aging process. If more air slips in, the wine ages faster, i.e., must be consumed sooner in order not to be so oxidized as to be unpalatable.
What is currently not clear is whether any air supply at all is needed for wine to age in a fashion most people would consider desirable and do so within reasonable time. Consequently, it is not clear at this point whether a perfectly airtight closure is desirable.
I think that most wax is placed on bottles for effect.
The affectation makes me wax philopsphical. But I can neither prove that, nor deny that.
Perhaps it explains those damn Dunns, which take eons to come around.
Every time I hear that I think of this picture from the Australian Wine Research Institute looking at cork vs Stelvin.
I don’t know where those were stored but I have 13 year old Sauternes that don’t look anything like 3/4 of those bottles on the right side at 125 months.
Just saying.
If corks do allow air to enter the bottle, only a small amount is going to, and that will be as the argon or whatever inert gas is inserted during bottling. Once the air is in, it isn’t going to exchange and more and more air enter over time. There isn’t any circulation.
As the argon seaps out of the bottle, a vacuum would be created that may pull air in.
And I have no idea of any of this is real, I may just like making stuff up.
Rob, please explain what We see on the picture.
-Søren.
Wine was Semillon, not Sauternes…
IIRC, the left wine is the control bottle under stelvin, the rest were under cork of various grades (and maybe some other type of synthetic cork closure)?
That picture shows oxidation, not aging.
I believe that’s right. There was a Stelvin/screw cap, multiple grades of cork plus various other synthetic or partly synthetic closures. The darkest, most oxidized wines were NOT the ones under cork. The plastic corks were by far the worst for oxygen penetration. I assume that’s why you don’t see them much anymore.
I don’t believe that inert gases are used universally in bottling.
There are some researchers who think the dissolved oxygen in the wine is sufficient to achieve the beneficial effects of slow oxidative processes, without any seepage through the closure, according to Jamie Goode’s The Science of Wine (1st edition, page 162). And in the Australian research on closures, additional penetration of oxygen through the various closures correlated with undesirable oxidation, not good aging.
Moreover the best corks (and there is huge variability) allow very little oxygen through. And, certainly, there are many very fine mature bottles with very high fills – and thus, presumably, very impermeable corks – that have developed beautifully.
So, while the lore is that the imperfect seal of a cork is good for aging, that’s evidently open to scientific debate. Part of the problem is that the processes of wine aging still aren’t very well understood.
Wax used as capsules is air permeable. Have no effect on oxidation at all.