… Nice!
I was going to drop it in… but then I did read your entire post. Well done sir!.. both in a good post and calling yourself out on the TLDR!
Bob, that’ a BS point. We bill on 1/10s of an hour, so it would be 360 seconds minimum. Minimum. ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
As to your second point, I’ve been party to countless tastings where expensive wines destroy their less expensive counterparts, and vice versa. Frequently, though, we’re talking about very expensive wines against slightly less expensive wines. Or, we’re talking about a single ringer tossed into the mix of a large number of very high quality and exceptionally similar wines. The one less expensive wine tends to stand out largely because it is different from all of the others. The ringer test is bologna. Put 40 cheaps against 40 expensives in a two day tasting and I am willing to put money that, if taken as random samples from their respective price range, the expensives will score higher. The ringer-effect creates an unreasonable bias, and it’s one I’ve seen a number of times. I get it. That’s not a direct comparison on equal footing, and so I disagree with your assertion.
For much more extensive data sets to substantiate my argument, why don’t you simply review a few issues of the magazine that Kramer writes for. Doing so will quickly negate the validity of your point, as the vast majority of high-scoring wines, tasted blind by wine spectator, are considerably more expensive than their cheaper counterparts within the varietal and region. There are always outliers, sure. But generally speaking, price and score have a significant correlation.
Finally, Neal is right, Bob. It’s 6 minutes of your time no matter what!
When I worked harvest, the attorney drove the tractor. Not sure why.
On structure, I usually to take that to mean the combination of tannin, acid, alcohol and extract, not tannin alone. So I think Kramer is sloppy in the way he casts that. But his conclusion – that it’s balance that matters rather than just tannin is certainly right. You need enough (and not too much) of all those things and their trajectories have to intersect at some point (i.e., not be like Dunn Howell Mountain and remain tannic forever) for the wine to age gracefully.
John, I think you must be assuming that when an old cork disintegrates it has “dried out”. Do you have any evidence for that assumption, or is it just a guess based on the fact that cake crumbles when it dries out? ![[basic-smile.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/83717c74df9b0ce202453063bc4f11baf0ee6b8a.gif "smile"){kind=small}
I don’t know if old and new corks have ever been analysed for water content, but I do know of at least two arguments that support Kramer’s view.
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Cork is a natural plant product, and all plant products begin to degrade once they die or are detached from a living plant. Why should cork be any different, it would be unique in nature if it didn’t begin to degrade once cut from the tree. In nature this degradation process always speeds up in the presence of moisture, so the argument could well be made that lower humidities would prolong cork life.
It is also true that natural degradation proceeds more slowly at lower temps, and I think this is the major argument in favor of lower cellar temperatures…the corks degrade more slowly and just last longer. -
Whilst I agree with Kramer that new cork is impermeable to both water and oxygen, I could be wrong, and if it were permeable, water would have to migrate thru the cork by diffusion. The diffusion process is driven by differences in molecular concentation on either side of a permeable membrane. The concentration of water at the wet end of a cork is about 800,000 gm/cu meter. By comparison, at the dry end of the cork and in a cellar at 55°F and 100% relative humidity, the water concentration is about 11 gm/cu meter, reduced to 5gm/cu meter at 45% humidity. So the driver at the wet end, forcing water into the cork would be 80,000 times greater than any possible driver at the dry end. The wet end would quickly become saturated with water, and ullage would be seen soon after bottling. We know this is not true, so I don’t see how miniscule changes in absolute humidity at the dry end can have any impact on cork water concentration.
Peter,
I can easily tell how wine was kept by the condition of the cork. I have opened my share of the 80s Bordeaux with a dry and crumbling cork. I have no clue about the chemistry but I have opened enough wines to realize the importance of humidity.
Interesting post. Had Kramer included the type of analysis in your second point, I would have been much slower to attack his article, which I thought was raelly loosely put together.
Your first point is an interesting one. Humidity and warm temperatures generally do seem to speed up the process of decay, while arid and cold conditions tend to slow down decay, so I get your point, and it’s thought provoking. My counter would be that the condition of the cork should focus more on whether the cork can maintain a seal, than the actual state of decay of the cork. I’ve opened old burgundies with mold on the top of the cork, and with corks that seemed a little squishy. Some of those same corks maintained incredible seals, resulting in 50 year old wines with no ullage. That’s all that I care about. So, the issue comes down to whether the Cork can maintain it’s uniform seal, which directly requires the cork to maintain a constant minimum diameter. Dehydration reduces mass, causing shrinkage. See dried flowers, dehydrated humans, raisens, dried grass, etc. While the cork may be in better “condition” as to decay in dry conditions is moot. The issue is whether the Cork will retain its size. You address that issue in more detail in your second point by arguing that cork’s apparent lack of permeability, as evidenced by no wine seeping into the cork, should preclude a change in size due to loss of moisture.
Shall we steam a cork and bake a cork and see what the result in weight is?
How do you know that’s caused by humidity and isn’t just a reflection of bad cork quality?
How about opening hundreds of wines from your personal cellar which is set at 55 degrees and 75% humidity, and never having a single shrunk cork or dry crumbly cork. Then, by contrast, pulling bottles off of a shelf at a store, or from another cellar that has no humidity control and is dry, and repeatedly having issues with dry crumbly corks. That’s by no means a scientific expirement, but at some point your sample size experience can account for some lack of controls. Or not. Could just be recurring coincedence.
I don’t believe in travel shock, and one can’t argue that with anything but personal experience, so I suppose i’m inconsistent.
John,
I purchased and drank a lot of Bordeaux from the 40s and the 50s. I worked very closely with my contacts at various auction houses and no issues with the corks, still firm and moist. On the other hand, I dealt with a number of the 90s Bordeaux that have dry/crumbling cork that were purchased from various sources. You can easily experiment by buying two bottles of KJ chardonnay, leave a bottle in your living space and the other in your cellar for a year or two.
Another great example is Bern’s steakhouse. You won’t find any dry corks.
Or a wine stored on a shelf standing upright?
That would actually support our argument. Kramer’s argument suggests that storing a wine upright should have no impact on the cork’s moistness, since it’s just a tiny little area and the vast majority of the cork is compressed into an air-tight hold. What applies to one end of the cork should apply to both, right? Stand them up folks!
Kevin, these results may well be due to temperature variation or poorer cork quality in the '90s rather than humidity. I guess the only way to know for sure would be to sample wines stored from release in two cellars kept at identical temperatures but one having high humidity and the other low.
John, that would be an interesting experiment. We would need access to an extremely accurate weigh scale for meaningful results ! !
If it’s a shrunken cork, I buy the humidity theory completely. I was responding to the “dry and crumbly” and focusing on the crumbly part. In my experience, crumbly corks often are somewhat moist.
Maybe we’re just talking about different things.
Cork is compressible and maintains its compressibility and flexibility over long periods of time, despite the fact it’s constantly under load when pressed into the neck of a bottle. It is unique in that most other flexible products, including for example foamed plastics and even metal springs, tend to creep under prolonged load and loose their properties. It could be argued that the absorption of water into cork would actually make it easier for the long chain cork molecules to slide over each other and move away from the load…leading to loss of compression and poor seal. In my view it’s the fact that cork is impermeable to water that makes it such a great, long lasting seal. It’s a miracle that any cork could last for 40 years or more with one end submerged in water.
There’s no doubt in my mind that dry conditions dry out corks. Kramer is wrong on this.
I can understand that a cork subjected to both upright and horizontal storage would have risk of drying out. The penetration of moisture while lying down would lessen the natural expanding sealing properties of the cork. When the bottle is stood up the cork with water already penetrated would then dry out resulting in a risk of shrinkage of the cork allowing greater loss of moisture. I would think a bottle stored standing up from bottling onward would be a much more secure and robust closure to one subjected to change in storage, probably more robust than one that has always been stored horizontally, that is depending on the quality of the cork in the first place. Certainly with German Rieslings, with short corks I would want to store them lying down, but Barolo with impressive corks I expect would be better stored standing up.
I know wineries keep bottles lying down but it is likely that this is because it is easier to store them that way.
For once Kramer wrote an article I can agree with and actually liked and here everyone is tearing into it.
What is cork? It’s bark. What is the purpose of bark? It’s to protect the rest of the tree from insects, fungal attack, and loss of moisture.
What is the structure of cork? It’s a bunch of small “balloons” filled with air. What is the membrane of the balloon made of? Mostly suberin, which is like a wax, and some cellulose and some lignin, which actually makes up about 25% of the material. Grossly simplified, lignin provides the structure and resistance to compression, while suberin provides the impermeability, and the air within the “balloons” provides the cushion that allows a piece of cork to be compressed. Lignin has negligible water absorption and the suberin even less.
So the idea that cork needs to be kept moist is refuted by the structure of cork itself. Those old Roman wines that were prized with age were NOT stored on their sides - they were in amphorae and were stored upright. It’s only the Bordeaux shaped bottle that allowed wine to be stored on the side; earlier bottles were blown and had rounder bottoms that didn’t stack. So people confused correlation with causation - bottles are stacked on their sides, wine touches the cork, therefore it must be necessary.
For air or oxygen or something to get thru the cork, it has to have some pathway and some driver. The driver can be Brownian motion and concentration differentials on either side of the cork.
But we still need a pathway. So how would air go through a cork? The cork cells are kind of like a beehive - they’re stacked on each other and there’s no communication between them. So how does the air or water get through? Through flaws - tunnels that have been made by fungus or insects or just nature.
But not all corks are flawed. Thank God. We just don’t know which ones are and which ones aren’t. That’s called romance. So how does the wine keep the entire compressed cork moist? The short answer is that it doesn’t.
There was an idea that water travelled up a 100 foot tree from the roots because as molecules evaporated from the leaves, the bonds between water molecules pulled a whole column of water up the tree. That’s been shown to be impossible. But that would have to be the case with water evaporating out the end of a cork. But bark, or cork, doesn’t have xylem tubes to carry water out of the bottle.
And what about capsules? The wine is so anxious to evaporate that it goes right through the capsule, no matter what the capsule is made of? That just isn’t the case. The most humid cellars I’ve ever been in were carved into mountainsides and they have water dripping down the walls. Labels are destroyed by mold within a few months. So if they care, the owners wrap the bottles in Saran Wrap or something similar and there’s no damage. The capsules do the same thing for the cork.
Finally, if moisture moved through the cork, wouldn’t the cork be wicking out the wine and wouldn’t the floors of Eurocaves be wet all the time from the leaking wine?
The best corks are impermeable to gas and liquids.