Screw Caps
Kim Crawford's 2002 "Unoaked Marlborough Chardonnay" is a good wine, if not the standout that Sauvignon Blancs from the same region are. But it is not the wine that I want to write about, it is the bottle. More specifically, the closure. For Kim Crawford has chosen to seal this bottle with a screw cap, and through a random chain of events that culminated in one of our dining companions at Easter dinner bringing a bottle with her, it is the first screw capped bottle of nice wine that I've seen.
It must be said that I haven't devoted a lot of effort to actually finding one before now: I know Bonny Doon's most recent releases of Big House Red and Big House White are screw capped. And Kim Crawford is merely one of a whole host of New Zealand wineries that are using them. Lots of other wineries are doing some portion of their bottlings with screw caps, and lots more are waiting to see how those wines do in the market. So if I were really determined, I'm sure I could've found one by now. Still, it was exciting to see one finally.
Screw caps are seen in this country as an indicator of swill, the residual effects of seeing year after year of wretched, cheap, mass-produced wine closed just this way. But screw caps, or Stelvin closures, as they are called by people aware of the negative connotations of the words "screw cap", are quietly gaining ground among adventurous wine makers and knowing wine drinkers.
Why? A perfect answer to this question was provided by the 2000 Ridge Buchignani Zinfandel we brought to Easter dinner. One sniff of my glass, and I knew it was ruined by cork taint. Descriptors for cork taint include "gym socks", "wet newspaper", and even tuna. To me it just smells like really pungent cork. Despite the name, cork taint doesn't have to come from corks. Beaulieu Vineyards discovered this recently when they discovered that a humidifier they had installed in one of their cellars was causing a high percentage of "corked" wines. But corks are by far the most common vector for the fungus which produces the chemical responsible for the smell. And while it's not harmful to you, the drinker, it obviously doesn't make for a very good wine.
Various cork proponents go on and on about the ritual of uncorking wine, the inherent romance of this action. But I'd be willing to believe that a number of them have Rabbit corkscrews or their knock-offs, the ingenious devices which proudly proclaim their ability to open a bottle of wine in 3 seconds. We've got one; we love it, and I'll bet a lot of them do too. Where's the romance there? And frankly, I'd rather fill in romance in other ways than pour a bottle of wine down the drain.
One theory, yet to be validated or not, is that screw capped wines don't age as well. There's no flow of oxygen to assist the wine in mellowing over time, and so screw caps are best suited to wines meant to be drunk young: Bonny Doon's wines, the New Zealand Chardonnay. I don't know. Randall Grahm, president of Bonny Doon, scoffs and says all the oxygen needed by the wine is already in there. But I don't think he's put it to the test. And I've had a devil of a time figuring out how oxygen flows in a cork-top bottle. The tightly wrapped foil and dense cork don't seem to admit much in the way of flow. But time will tell on that one. Plumpjack has screw capped some of their high-end bottlings, so perhaps in five or ten years we'll be able to get an idea.
I'm obviously a big screw cap proponent, and happily encourage everyone to not be put off by the sight of a screw cap on a bottle. Not only is not necessarily swill, it might be a lot better than the corked bottle next to it.
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