Wine: Traditional Cork or Screw Cap?

I’m down in the basement with John. Once upon a time, John’s family owned a wine business in St. Louis. The business started out in the late 1800’s and did pretty well until the time that the Gallo brothers started bulldozing their way across the country. Go downtown and you can still see one of the company’s old abandoned warehouses. If you look real hard, you can still make out the faint outlines of the sign that was painted onto the red brick. “Ah, here it is.” John says. He holds up what appears to be the cut off end of a wine barrel, about 3 or 4 inches thick.

Originally the family business sold other spirits besides wine: brandy, bourbon, almost everything except for beer. That was left to the Busches. The barrel has some faded advertising on it. It’s a scene from the turn of the century. Three gentlemen are seated around what appears to be a poker table. They are dressed in old fashioned suits. One is wearing a top hat. They are all smoking cigars. Each has an almost full glass of bourbon sitting in front of them. The almost empty bottle sits in the middle of the table. Underneath the scene, the caption reads: “We owe our sparkling good health to Sunshine Bourbon.”

Times have changed. It’s a good bet that you wouldn’t see that kind of advertising these days, even for bourbon. But things in the wine business are slow to change. John tells me about an idea that he had over twenty years ago to package wine in a six pack. Six individual stemmed glasses filled with wine, ready to drink. The individual packaging idea has only recently begun to take hold, and mostly with fruity wine drinks aimed at a younger audience.

One thing that is starting to change is the wine industry’s attitude towards cork stopper vs. screw cap. For the first time in history more people in a recent Gallop poll said that they preferred wine to beer as their drink of choice. As a result of the increased production by wineries, there is a greater chance that we could come down with a bottle of “corked” wine. The term “corked” means that mold has affected the cork, leaving the wine with a musty taste and smell. This can affect almost one in every twenty bottles of wine. Some of the major wine labels have responded by using synthetic corks, which really don’t make sense because they are difficult to remove and almost impossible to reseal.

The screw cap, or Stelvin cap, is a more logical choice. They form a better seal and are very easy to screw back on. Consumer reaction to the screw caps has been good and growing all the time. Nothing is worse than showing off a very expensive bottle of wine, and then realizing after you open it that it’s gone bad. A recent survey showed that about 60 percent of all American homes don’t even have a corkscrew. Some of the wineries have been slow to change and the cork companies are working on making the natural cork more reliable using more sophisticated testing. Until then, it’s down to a battle between the screw-cappers and the traditionalists, and it’s up to the consumer to decide.