Screw the Future

The value of screw tops and why we’re not ready for them
By Cameron Fries, White Heron Cellars

The screw top closure is definitely the future of wine. I once read an article which quoted a New Zealand wine maker, and I can remember neither the publication nor the wine maker. But at least I am being honest in that I am stating up front the idea is not mine. In any case, let us pretend for a moment that cork had never existed and that screw tops were the norm. A cork salesman arrives and says, “Hey, I have a new closure for you. It will leak far more often than your screw top. And it will on occasion—two to ten percent of the time—make your wine taste terrible, or at the very least, significantly reduce the wine’s fruit characteristics. And the wine drinker will either need a special tool for opening the bottle, or they can push the cork into the wine, or if they hit the bottom of the bottle just right on a tree trunk, it will pop the cork out. But all of these problems will be reduced to nothing because of the neat pop the cork makes when pulled out of the bottle.”

I suspect that most of us would decline to purchase such a product. The primary problem with a screw top is that it is associated with cheap wine. That is it. There is no other problem with a screw top. They can even be designed in such a way that one cannot tell visually that it is a screw top. Actually there are a couple of technical problems with screw tops. One in ten thousand will delaminate from the metal, thus allowing wine and metal to come into contact and making the wine taste terrible. You still have to taste the wine when it is brought to your table by your sommelier. Also, the actual seal in a screw top is between the lip of the bottle and the inside of the screw top. The top of the bottle therefore needs to be perfectly smooth to seal properly.

The wine screw top was originally created for the Swiss wine market by a French company. It just so happens that I was going to wine school in Switzerland when the screw top was coming into prominence. In our tasting class, we were given wine that was ten years old, some with cork and some with screw tops. Swiss white wine tends to be delicate with ethereal aromas; and we actually preferred the screw top wine, because it had not aged as much as the corked wine and thus had preserved its freshness.

Many years later, I shook my head when I heard that PlumpJack Winery in California (they make one of the most expensive Cabernets in California) had bottled their Cab with screw tops. “How,” I wondered, “is that wine going to age?” A bit later, I was talking to the representative of a screw top manufacturer and asked him that exact question. He informed me that technology had moved on, and they could now provide oxygen-permeable membranes.

Since this is now the case, consider the following. The oldest wine I have in my cellar is a 1984. This wine is still drinking well with good fruit and complex flavors coming from age. However, there are variations from bottle to bottle. Some have leaked a bit, others have aged more. A screw top closure would be far more consistent from bottle to bottle.

As a side story, the expensive Château wines from Bordeaux have representatives that will travel all over the world from time to time replacing corks and refilling bottles with the original vintage. Naturally, one must pay for this, but the irony is as follows. Leave it to a prestigious wine writer to decide to taste comparatively wines that had had their corks replaced with those that had not. This unnamed individual claims that the untouched bottles tasted better. Once again, screw caps.

This brings us to other alternative closures. In effect, all other alternatives may solve the problems associated with corks, but they are either more expensive or less interesting. Plastic corks? You still need a corkscrew, and in effect, they are an attempt to fool the consumer into thinking “quality.” Although, I must admit they come in pretty colors. There are various other attempts, but the only reason for not using a screw top is the association with “cheap.”

So here at White Heron, we are not ready to try to educate the consumer into the benefits of screw tops (we do wish Hogue Cellars all the best). Instead, we are using a French-made cork in which the cork has been ground up and reassembled—known in the trade as a technical cork. This cork is guaranteed not to flavor the wine and not to leak. In addition, these are less expensive since all the cork bark can be used. Thus we can continue with the tradition of cork, pleasing wine drinkers who like that tradition until the day comes when most of us are ready to switch to screw tops.