Plastic corks a break in tradition

Max Jacobson

Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001 | 8:15 a.m.

When a customer orders a bottle of wine, ritual demands that the cork be sniffed. Often, the consumer doesn't have the first idea what he is supposed to do with it. The fact is that there is both rhyme and reason for this ritual. Wine has been around for thousands of years, and during that time a bad cork usually has meant a bad wine.

It is troublesome enough when a cork crumbles, implying that the seal hasn't been that good to begin with, or that a wine has been improperly stored. Then there is cork taint. That means either that a mold has grown on the cork, thereby imparting a nasty smell to the wine and rendering it unable to drink with enjoyment, or that a compound called chloroanisole has been produced on the cork.

The latter is a substance so powerful it can be detected at parts per trillion. In either case, the wine is spoiled.

The wine industry today estimates, according to a recent article in the Wine Spectator, that approximately 3 to 5 percent of wines are damaged by faulty corks. Most of the world's natural cork comes from cork trees, a type of oak tree that grows in Portugal and Spain.

But there has recently been competition from plastic, or synthetic corks, to replace natural cork in many wines. Plastic corks don't break down, and they are easy to withdraw (unless you are using one of those Ah-So, double-pronged openers, which has a devil of a time removing a plastic cork). You simply insert the corkscrew into the plastic as you would into a natural cork and presto. Out it slides.

But this is an ongoing controversy in the wine world. Winemakers and wine tasters alike are weighing in on this subject, and many of them have interesting things to say. AWRI, an acronym for the Australian Wine Research Institute, has just published an objective study on this subject, and one of its most important conclusions is the following:

While many of the plastic corks were fine for up to one year of storage, many of them start letting oxygen in during the second year. This seems to vary with manufacturer. The most favored are SupremeCorq and Cellukork.

Interestingly enough, the maligned screwcap turns out to be the most reliable seal for keeping oxygen out of a wine bottle. With the tried and tested natural cork, wine keeps the cork wet, causing it to swell, thus keeping a tight, long-term seal, but not as tight as that of a screw cap.

Two competing wineries in Oregon, Argyle and Erath, both in the Willamette Valley, have different ideas about plastic corks. Erath now uses SupremeCorq in all its wines, even it its expensive Reserve Pinot Noir. Argyle, on the other hand, has stopped using these corks in all but a few vintages of its reds.

Assistant Winemaker at Argyle Reinhard Schlassa said that his Rieslings lost all of the aging potential when corked with plastic, although it is less of an issue with the reds.

"My reds still taste fresh from the 1997 vintage, but the whites were decanted and disposed," Schlassa said.

Jay James, master sommelier and director of wine at Bellagio, is one of the leading lights in the local wine world. According to James, it is "tradition versus innovation."

"People expect high quality wines to be sealed with a cork, and we are generations away from thinking differently," James says.

"Some people say they can taste the difference," he said, "but I am skeptical about that." James said one potentially ideal solution would be for wines that are intended to be consumed within two or three years to be corked with plastic or synthetic corks. "Purely as a business model," he was quick to point out, "I'd like to see this happen."

James went on to explain his reasons.

"The cork producers in Portugal are having a hard time meeting demands for high quality corks, and the overall quality of these corks has been degraded. What was a second or third quality cork 20 years ago is called a first quality cork today." James said. "If all these cheap California Chardonnays that people drink within months of purchase were not gobbling up good corks, then there would be a better pool of corks for the wines that really need them."

Let's face it: Although reds haven't suffered from being corked in plastic, would you want to chance storing that topnotch Bordeaux with a plastic cork for 20 years? The fact is, these corks are untested in the long term, and no one is willing to take the chance.

Steven Hua, sommelier at Piero Selvaggio Valentino, says that these corks break down over time and lose their elasticity. Nonetheless, he serves a wide variety of Italian wines that come with the synthetic corks, and says he rarely gets any complaints from guests.

One more opinion on this subject comes from way down under, Kumeu River, New Zealand, from that country's first master of wine, Michael Brajkovich.

"Our collective opinion is that screw caps are the way to go," he said. "Synthetic corks just do not work, because there is some oxidation, and a distinct 'plastic' aroma with some wines."

Brajkovich cited screw caps because natural cork sometimes has problems with random oxidation and premature maturation. Natural corks are gas permeable, while screw caps are not. The Parducci Winery of California has been advocating screw caps all along. The biggest problem seems to be visual appeal, or ordinary, garden variety snob appeal. At any rate, don't expect to seem them proliferate much in the near future.

Is it really beyond modern technology to improve on the natural cork, an ancient method that has probably been with us since before the written record? At the present moment, it would appear so, so we'll just have to write off that bad 5 percent.