That is definitely preferred by a growing number of us.
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I’ve had a decent number of Tercero reds and whites at 8-12 years old, and they are definitely not frozen in youth. They unmistakably age and evolve.
The whites, in particular, take on maturing earthiness, petrol, umami and other notes that are substantially different than how they profile young.
I can’t say how much different, better or worse those exact same wines would be under cork or under DIAM, but there is no question in my mind that the wines mature and evolve.
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They can produce different degrees of OTR within a range, in fact.
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Did I res herring the thread at the outset? IE is it not the question of headspace, but other factor? I would think one could scale down a magnum to be a 750ml bottle with the same effect on the wine - but your comments suggest that would not be the case.
Thanks for this. Just by coincidence, somebody else posted a better chart in a different thread today that makes it much more clear.
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When I poured the leaky white I had (which had age on it already) my Wife called out petrol. Funny because I’ve never heard her utter that word before. She was spot in though.
FWIW, I don’t think cork vs screw cap does anything to the acidity or the texture of the wine. It’s just the aromatics and flavors that are strikingly different to me.
IIRC @Jamie_Goode (or perhaps somebody else) wrote somewhere how on thing the tiny dose oxygen that remains in the cork, between the cork cells. Although the bottle might be purged of oxygen before stoppering the wine, a small dose of oxygen comes from the cork to the wine, which is one drastic difference between a wine stoppered with a natural cork vs. screw cap. If you purge a wine and seal it with a screw cap, there is not going to be any oxygen, so a wine needs to age for quite some time before accumulating enough dissolved oxygen comparable to a wine sealed with a natural cork or DIAM.
This much I’ve understood, but still haven’t noticed any noticeable difference. I’m not telling I can pick up a wine sealed with a screw cap in a blind tasting with 100% accuracy, but the other way around - when the wine seems to show “screw cap fault”, it is almost invariably a screwcapped wine. However, not all wines sealed with screw caps show these qualities - however, I have no idea if this because of the different OTR:s, because of the wine itself or something else.
It was a blind Riesling tasting, not a tasting of different closures, so no, there were no wines bottled under both. Just Rieslings all over the world, tasted blind.
The screwcapped wines in the tasting were a 2013 Willamette, Alto Adige 2016, 2015 Mosel, 2013 Clare Valley, 2022 Bio-Bio, 2016 Wachau and 2014 Rheinhessen. Of these, the '16 Alto Adige, '13 Clare Valley and '16 Wachau just screamed screw cap when tasting blind. '13 Willamette and '15 Mosel weren’t that obvious, but they were both surprisingly (or atypically) youthful for their age. Of these, only that '14 Rheinhessen didn’t seem super young or showing any obvious “screwcapped” qualities.
Agree 100% with you here.
I haven’t delved that deep into the difference between OTR of different closures, etc. but I suppose the initial dose of oxygen and differences between the oxygen transmission are in play here. I have no idea whether it’s possible, but I suppose cork might help to alleviate some problems with reduction (ie. sulfur-containing compounds that appear in the absence of oxygen) - at least that is one element screwcapped wines are lacking, and based on my hunch, the elements from which I can detect a screwcapped wine are some reduced compounds you normally don’t come across in wines closed with a natural cork.
Being disappointed feels a bit exaggerated. I think it might be something of a disappointment when opening a 15-yo Chablis Grand Cru and thinking it is a Western Australia Chardonnay a few years old. The wine might offer great pleasure and not be disappointing as such, but I might be disappointed in how the wine has aged. However, I wouldn’t mind if all the producers moved to lightweight Bdx bottles. Probably lightweight Burgundy bottles would be allowed too, since it might be just too weird to drink a Grand Cru Burgundy from a Bordeaux bottle, lol.
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It’s not about the headspace! It’s because you have 1500 ml of wine with the same oxygen transmission from the cork, so the wine is seeing less oxygen.
It’s a complicated technical topic, and not fully understood.
But the exposure of wine to oxygen post-bottling has three components. First, any oxygen present in the headspace, as well as any oxygen pick-up during bottling. With a modern well-maintained bottling line both should be minimal. but with old school bottling this will be a factor.
Then we have the steady state OTR of the closure. For a good cork this should be minimal, but corks are a little variable. Before we get to this steady state, there’s also a period of perhaps 2-3 months where any oxygen present in the body of the cork diffuses out.
So it’s a dynamic process, not easily mimicked by a screwcap liner engineered to allow a little oxygen transmission.
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Indeed this was the point that was in my mind. I remember reading somewhere - can’t remember where - that this might have quite a big impact in how the wine behaves and ages in the handful of years following the bottling. This dose of oxygen might help to keep those reductive compounds away that might appear in a screwcapped wine that has been prepared in every way identical to a wine stoppered with a natural cork, both closures having identical OTRs. It simply takes quite a lot of time from the screwcapped wine to “catch up”, even if the aging curves of the wines should eventually start to converge with enough time.
That is all super interesting to me. It amazing how complicated grape juice can be with science and time.
All I know is that I love having an aged wine that has developed over the years but I don’t think I want to wait even longer than I already do. If a 1%-2% flawed rate is what I have to change to shave off a couple of years then cork works for me. DIAM seems to be the best of both worlds. 
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No. There is a myth that corks allow a certain amount of air into the wine.
And NOBODY can tell you exactly how much is to be added. It’s all very mysterious.
A good cork does not allow any air into the wine. The air that enters the wine is from the piston-like action of the cork when it’s inserted and the rest is in the cork itself. The entire point of cork is to protect the tree from losing its moisture so why would it allow “just the right amount” of air to transfer?
And because corks are natural, they are variable.
If you want air in your wine, you can create a cap that will allow
as much as you want. They can create artificial lenses for your eyeballs if they’re damaged, so certainly today they can create closures that are far better than the sixteenth century closure people fetishize.
I’ve tasted plenty of wines under screwcaps and under cork and would absolutely prefer screwcaps if I were making wine.
And look at your corks. Are they 38 ml, 44 ml, 55 ml? And do all of them allow exactly the same amount of oxygen to enter at exactly the same rate, even if they’re covered with a plastic capsule, wax, or tin capsule? None of those things matter at all?
Contrary to popular belief, wine will age just fine under a screwcap. The aging of wine is NOT based on air exchange through a cork. It ages in a reductive environment. You aren’t trying to oxidize your wine, you’re trying to age it, and those are not the same thing.
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Yes, I think so. See Jamie’s post as well. Headspace is surely a factor, but in a long aging wine, for a given cork OTR, the doubled volume of a magnum makes the biggest difference. I also never hear anything about how the glass surface is involved in reactions that contribute to aging (if at all), but if so, that’s another factor in favor of magnums.
Why have I never read an analysis that points to a likely certain reason wines sealed under cork receive some oxygen dose due to this feature of cork-sealed wines: that is, as the cork is inserted into the bottle a vacuum is drawn to keep the inch or so of air from being compressed. (If the vacuum wasn’t working, corks would sometimes push out a bit…or a lot.) This vacuum likely resolves over minutes or days (or weeks!), with the bottle kind of taking a breath of the surrounding atmosphere.
We used to test to make sure the remaining headspace was a negative pressure by jamming a needle gauge through an occasional cork into that headspace. You can also see the vacuum being drawn - the wine level “jumps” a little at that time.
Have to agree with Alan - the same cork size with twice the wine volume must account for slower aging of magnums. Same reasoning applies to why we never liked splits. Thankfully screw caps have solved this.
Have to agree with Larry, too. We’ve been under glass stoppers and screw caps for almost 20 years. Wines evolve, though more slowly. The consistency is wonderful. No sweating over whether the cork has ruined a prized wine. Also, one can feel some certainty as to how the same wine is evolving if one has multiple bottles of the same wine.
Peter Rosback
Sineann
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So why not bottle 750s and 375s with small necks and corks?
Costs probably? Then you’re looking at a lot of changes to not only create a manufacturing process for the new bottles, but also custom corks for the narrower necks. In the end it’s not clear whether the same magic would work since the volume of wine is still half that of a magnum.
[quote=“EdvardsA, post:55, topic:308568, full:true”]
Costs probably? …In the end it’s not clear whether the same magic would work.[/quote]
I wonder if someone has tried to do this over the last 500+ years. I wonder if magnums were known to age better hundreds of years ago?
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