< The WineGeese Stories

The principal subject under discussion throughout the wine world today concerns which variety of stopper is most suitable for sealing wine—the natural cork, the aluminium screwcap, or the innovative glass Vino-Lok also called Vino-Seal.

All three have their passionate adherents. Traditionalists are convinced that quality natural cork is a perfect closure and the only one suitable for long term aging of wine.

Cork
Its opponents, mostly the wine industry, claim that up to four per cent of wines sealed with corks are spoiled. However, the cork producers say they have introduced new procedures and technology that virtually eradicates trichloranisole (TCA), the compound responsible for “corked” wine – the musty odor and taste wine picks up from defective corks.

Kerry Murphy uses nothing but natural cork for his internationally acclaimed DuMOL wines from the Russian River Valley, Sonoma—each cork he explains is scientifically tested at the winery to ensure it is of the highest quality.

Screwcaps
On the other hand, the PlumpJack Winery in Napa Valley, owned in partnership by oil billionaire Gordon Getty and Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco, has been among the leading pioneers of the use of screwcaps in America—sealing half of its classic 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon with screwcaps and half with cork—its winemaker subsequently found the wine sealed with screwcaps to have matured to a finer quality than those sealed with corks.

Sharing the same opinion are many of the top producers in Australia like Denis Horgan of Leewuin Estate in Margaret River and Bruce Tyrrell of Tyrrell Wines in the Hunter Valley. However, the leading Bordeaux châteaux, who have conducted their own study of the subject, find that the same vintage stoppered by capsule and cork showed no difference in maturity up to the first five years when that under capsule ceased to mature any further while that under cork continued to evolve.

Vino-Lok
Recently introduced to the market is the Vino-Lok, a glass stopper with a plastic seal that provides an airtight closure without ever coming into contact with the wine. Scott McWilliam of McWilliam’s Mt Pleasant in the Hunter Valley is researching the potential of this type of closure.

Yet despite the occasional inconvenience caused by tainted wine, a recent survey found that nine out of ten European wine lovers favored cork above any other type of stopper.

Science
Gene Mulvihill, owner of Restaurant Latour at Crystal Springs in New Jersey has in conjunction with Matthew Augustine, Associate Professor of Chemistry at the Univeristy of California, Davis designed a machine to detect cork taint without removing the cork or capsule from the bottle. The machine operates by slipping a metal tube over the bottleneck and air is extracted from the tube thus creating a vacumn. Without penetrating either the cork or capsule, molecules are collected on a fiber within the tube. Utilizing gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, the fiber is analyzed for cork taint or any other malady.

Mulvihill has tested a machine on expensive bottles in his restaurant in order to eliminate corked and oxidised wines from his inventory. This machine costing $50,000 is really only directed at auction houses and for use on prized wines like expensive clarets and Penfolds Grange.

— Denis Horgan, Scott McWilliam, Kerry Murphy, Gavin Newsom, and Bruce Tyrrell are honorary members of the WineGeese Society.

© Ted Murphy