Some years back I’d bought a bottle of 2005 Gaia Santorini Assyrtiko while visiting my mother. From the vintage, I’d guess I bought this around 2007. It ended up stashed away in her cellar, which has near-perfect storage conditions.
I popped it open on Christmas Eve. Expectations were low, and reasonably so. It has some marked oxidative notes, which became more sherry-like after the bottle was open for a while. It had a wonderful acidity, though, and it if weren’t for the darned plastic cork, I suspect this wine would have aged very nicely. Too bad they didn’t use a screw cap or a real cork.
Wasn’t all that long ago that I discovered I still had a 2002 Christoffel Kabinett in the cellar with a plastic cork. Utter disaster for that bottle, while the 2001 kabinetts are still chugging along with years to go under real cork, and the later wines are just fine under cap.
Yep, one of the ‘innovations’ that truly did not work in our industry. If you remember, closure innovations were created generally for two reasons:
To save costs
Due to high failure rates of corks, especially in Australia/New Zealand
Corks certainly are still, in general, more expensive than other closures, but not that much so that folks use this is the main reason to use other closures. Failure rates on the other hand . . .
Maybe I can add my rant about Nomacorc right about now. A case of 2005 Bourgogne, all shot. Novellum can be a nice, cheap chard but make sure it’s the latest release or they’re dead. A couple of Sancerre rouge, also 2005, goners.
The problem with Nomacorc is that you have no idea if it’s being used until you peel the capsule. Nomacorc sucks!
I actually wrote to the winemakers beseeching them to try and use something else for closure. The stuffing in these, when they are just released, screams “meaningful mid-term ageing material” to me. I suspect me being the only person on earth who has been systematically trying to age “Thalassitis” beyond five years out just to see how it turns out probably has something to do with why they never replied
John - that might be a good idea! I’ve had some wines that aged under plastic very nicely, but for the most part I think the plastic “corks” are the worst of all possible closures. They strip the Teflon off your corkscrew (if it’s Teflon coated), they don’t seal nearly as well as other closures, and I’ve even had “corked” wine from a bottle sealed with a plastic stopper. So they didn’t even get the benefit they thought they’d be getting.
If you have a place that has a real currency problem and has a hard time getting hard cash to pay for products, like say, Argentina, I can understand the use of plastic. And of course, that’s where I got the corked wine. But anywhere else it’s just irritating.
You’d think that material science would be such that they’d be able to produce a decent closure!