Do you prefer the cork or the screw cap?
3 types of cork
The traditional cork, made from the bark of Quercus suber, is produced mainly in Portugal. If the bark is removed only once every 9-12 years from a 25-year-old Quercus suber tree, the bark will grow back fully. Unless the removal is too frequent, the traditional cork can be made without sacrificing the health of the trees.
Aside from the traditional cork, there’s the Diam cork (developed by the French company Diam), which is made by biding plant-based polyols with beeswax. The Diam cork’s texture is like that of a corkboard or cork stickers.
Then there’s the Nomacorc cork (created in 1999 by 2 Belgians with their dedicated company headquartered in North Carolina, USA), made from sugarcane-based polymers with a foamy but firm feel.
On Sunday I was at a winery in Colli tortonesi and tasted one vintage Barbera bottled with three different cork stoppers: traditional, Diam and Nomacorc. The conclusion was that the flavours were brighter and more open with the traditional and the Diam ones. With Nomacorc, the wine tasted a bit closed.
“That’s why I have stopped using Nomacorc,” so the winemaker said.
A world of screw caps
Made of aluminium, screw caps have been used more widely in the New World (Americas, New Zealand and Australia). But in recent years, more winemakers in Italy, where tradition is everything, have also discovered the benefits of screw caps and are replacing corks with them.
It is generally believed that screw caps can 100% block oxygen, but this is not the case. Screw caps are also permeable to oxygen, only the amount is much lower than with a cork. For this reason, some time after the wine being bottled, the same wine of the same vintage sealed with a screw cap will taste fresher than its cork counterpart.
My friend’s experience has totally proved this. On this year’s Vinitaly, she tasted the same Timorasso of the same vintage bottled with a cork and a screw cap and found the latter younger and brighter.
“The one with the cork was good on its own, but when compared to the screw cap one, the difference was so out there,” she told me.
The screw cap is also available in different levels of oxygen permeability, so that it is controllable, very handy for winemakers.
Also, the capability of keeping the wine fresh with its low oxygen permeability significantly reduces the amount of SO2 added to the wine at bottling. Although a bottle of wine contains already less SO2 than a small pack of nuts, winemakers still look to reduce the amount added, as anything added to wine can affect its flavour in one way or another.
Last but not least, with the screw cap, a corked wine will no longer exist.
With all these advantages of screw caps, plus the fact that aluminium is recyclable, why are there still many wineries reluctant to use them?
The reason is that opening a screw cap wine “appears tasteless”.
Nowadays people have little patience. A 5-second reel is already too long for us, yet we are patient enough to watch the 20-30 second ritual of a cork being pulled out of the bottle with a corkscrew, as if the movement of cork removal itself was somewhat magical. From this point of view, the screw cap doesn’t stand a chance.
But with a little creativity, a new ritual with screw caps can also take shape, can’t it?
When opening a screw-capped bottle, we can do it like we’d open a sparkling wine, with one hand holding the bottom and the other on the top. Then turn the bottle with the bottom hand and keep the top hand still. This way for sure seems more elegant and “tasteful” than clining to the side of an upright bottle on the table with one hand and screw open the cap with the other.
What do you think?
