That’s a common topic of discussion in the wine trade these days. Patrick Middleton explains

I enjoy my wine but, to be honest, I don’t know much about it. Certainly, I’m much too lazy to get up to speed with winebabble. Time was when that could’ve been a problem for me. Over the years I’ve been on press trips to vineyards across the world from British Columbia (no, I’m serious) to Auckland harbour. From early on I kept ready a question that would win me respect from both hosts and colleagues. I regularly asked, frowning intensely: “And tell me, from where do you source your corks?” That gained me an immediate status as an oenological insider. 

“Product contaminated by corks”
These days that question might be less useful. The traditional cork is slowly but surely disappearing. It’s still got many years ahead of it, I’d say, but its ultimate doom is certain. I discussed this with local wine merchant Guillaume Corbala: “That’s absolutely right. In France millions of corks are stuck in bottles every year. At the moment around 97 per cent of French wine comes in a bottle with a cork. But the use of screw-caps and beer-style bottle tops is growing all the time, even if rather slowly. That’s in France. In Australia today something over 40 per cent of wine goes to the shops without a cork.”

Two questions, then. First, what’s the problem with corks? “I’ll answer that with a figure. At Vinexpo last year – that’s the big wine trade fair held in Bordeaux – it was found that around 7 per cent of the product brought in was contaminated by corks. They’re simply unreliable: they dry out, they crumble, they break under the corkscrew. Some just don’t fit too well and so air gets into the bottle and then you’ve got TCA, that’s a chlorine-based substance that’s used in making corks and can affect the wine badly.”

Second question: what could replace the traditional cork? “Well, it’s going to happen, as the Australian and Californian cases show. On one hand, you’ve got synthetic corks, made of plastic. I’m not a fan. They can leak and are sometimes difficult to draw. The big argument, of course, is about screw caps and also those bottle-tops you get with beer. This could be big for the aluminium industry. On the anti- side there’s a lot of snobbery involved. You’ll find people saying that no decent wine could be bottled that way. Frankly, as New World producers are showing us, that’s nonsense. Of course, in France there is a lot of resistance but it’ll only need a few top labels to make the change and it’ll catch on fast. That’ll mean no more calling the waiter to try un vin bouchonné ...”

From Reporter 115 - June/July 2006

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