Scrape My Jaw Off the Floor
According to an article at Wine Spectator, some French producers are officially beginning to experiment with screw caps ("Stelvin closures", if "screw caps" sounds too trashy).
I figured the French would be the last bastion of support for corks. Well, perhaps the penultimate; I imagine Portugal, where most of the world's cork is grown, will continue to use it for some time. When I ask French wine makers and wine enthusiasts for their opinion on corks, the answer is predictable: "Wine should be a ritual. Opening a bottle should be an event." Yes, nothing says tradition like pouring good wine down the drain.
Cork is susceptible to a fungus which creates the chemical 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, TCA for short. TCA isn't harmful to humans, but it can ruin wine, from mild effects such as killing the fruit to more noticeable effects where the wine smells like wet cardboard, decaying newspaper, gym socks, or any other number of unpleasant descriptors, a condition called cork taint. This condition affects anywhere from 2-10% of the world's wines, depending on who you ask. Screw caps, not made from cork, aren't susceptible. It is a myth to believe that screw caps will extinguish the problem of cork taint altogether; it can still be rampant in the winery. However, screw caps will remove the primary vector of the fungus: corks.
Some argue that wines with screw caps won't age well, and so far the closures have made the biggest inroads in white wines meant to be drunk young; virtually every wine coming out of New Zealand now has a screw cap. But it's been known for a long time that cork forms a perfect seal. Throw a tight foil wrapper around the top, and I'd be hard-pressed to believe that any oxygen is getting in. Screw cap enthusiasts point out that this means that all the oxygen you need for aging the wine is already in the bottle after bottling, and that a screw cap preserves the wine as it was originally bottled.
Still, I can understand the hesitation. If you're laying a red wine down for years, you don't want to run the risk that it will be ruined when you do open it. Randall Grahm at Bonny Doon isn't worried though; all his wine is now screw-capped, including his high-end "Le Cigare Volant". He's embraced the new closures more eagerly than most, but other California producers are bottling some of their wine with screw caps. Time will tell if the wines age well with screw caps, but I suspect that when it does, it will be the final collapse of the increasingly desperate arguments of cork enthusiasts.
And sure, opening a bottle of wine with a corkscrew is romantic and all; I don't deny that. But I want to drink all the wine in my collection, not just 90-98% of it.
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