Thanks Linda, and all. This has been an extremely informative thread. I’m happy the silver lining in my nail polish Rose is that I learned a good deal about this stuff.
mm is distance, not volume. Do you mean ml? There’s an international standard of bottle molds? When I turn upside down a screwcapped wine (unopened) I sure don’t see any larger an air bubble in the bottle than I do when upending a cork-sealed one. And certainly, my experience with screwcapped Antipodean wines is that sometimes the air bubble is very small indeed, sometimes even as small as German riesling under cork!..
cheers,
Graeme
Graeme:
I am aware of the difference between distance and volume. Like I said, bottles have designated distances or ullages from the top for 750 ml fills under standard conditions. That is one way (although not accepted by the TTB in this country) to check fill heights. It is also to help potential customers size their other packaging, like cork and capsule lengths.
While bottles vary greatly (and packaging norms country to country), there are pretty standard dimensions for bottles, as once a glass plant goes to the trouble to produce a particular mold, limiting your market of potential buyers of that glass is not good business. If you were to grab what looks to you to be a standard corked Claret bottle off the shelf from any country, I could probably guess what the important dimensions are. Finish (outside of the drip ring) will probably be 28-29 mm, bore size (inside of the top) will probably be ~18.5 mm. Of course, there are always outliers and special bottles for producers who can and do order wider mouths, bigger rings, longer necks, and so on.
So, a cork-finish bottle with a standard fill (750 ml @ 20 C) of 64 mm with a 49 mm cork will have an ullage of 15 mm. With an 18.5 mm standard bore, the ullage under that cork will be 4.03 ml. Let’s take the example of a Stelvin bottle designed to minimize headspace - 30 mm standard fill. With an 18.5 mm bore size, the ullage will be 8.06 ml.
Of course, as taper and other things factor in, the math gets trickier.
As I happen to have a drawing here for an in-production slightly-tapered Claret Stelvin-finished mold that I was looking at for potential use, they have gone to the trouble of calculating the headspace for me with a 44.5 mm standard fill and it is 0.373 fl oz or 11.03 ml.
If you review the technical documents and studies on closures, I see a lot of the recommended and quoted headspaces at 1.5-2% of total capacity (not wine volume). The one above is 1.45% by their calculations.
Again, so I am clear, I am not an anti-ROTE (or ROPE) person, nor do I wish to be painted as such (obviously, I have been looking at them myself). I prefer to have the facts in front of me, though. As I see it, the headspace issue is far from the crux of the debate and the real issues have been and will continue to be discussed many times via all sorts of avenues. Redox, TCA, permeability and consumer response are the real meat and potatoes of it.
It remains, though, that if the headspace is not properly managed, since there is so much more of it, oxidation can be a real issue…which is what I think this thread was about, as the OP was surprised to see oxidation in a ROTE-finished bottle, obviously expecting reduction if anything.
Good! Getting our first test data back now, and the results are promising. Pertinent to this thread and my comments about mechanical damage, we are actually experimenting with a feature the moves the wrapped edge of the cap liner to the inside lip of the bottle (patent pending of course 
)
That should help with consistency of the liner and also make sure that dings to the top of the bottle don’t compromise the seal.
We will be doing commercial trials this summer if the R&D program goes as expected.
I don’t know why we can’t just go to crown caps. Too ugly for some people? IDK.