Screw Caps or Corks?
By Rachel Brown
Do wine enclosures really matter?
Let’s picture it. It's date night, you’ve got a nice spread of cheeses and fruit. Maybe a few candles are burning and you’ve got a stellar wine to really set the tone for the evening. You reach for it and... it’s a screw cap? Does that really matter?
Screw cap versus cork has been a long debate and you’ll find many who have very set opinions on the matter: it’s cork or bust. But if you will, indulge me, and let’s journey down this twisted path together and see if we can shed some light and truth on the situation.
The first—we need to acknowledge that wine has very dreamy, very romantic connotations to it. As a previous English major and a lover of classic literature, I can totally get behind the romanticism of wine. A nice bottle to impress your partner, the removal of the cork and that ever enchanting pop! It sets the tone and adds a bit of flair to the evening but is it really the only indicator for a good wine?
The answer?
Nope!
Let’s break this down into some pros and cons for each.
Cork is a porous material that is harvested from cork trees (Quercus Suber) that primarily reside in Portugal and Spain on the Iberian Peninsula. This area is responsible for producing more than 80% of cork worldwide! This is also the only spot where these trees grow naturally.
So, let’s look at some of the pros and cons.
One of the largest pros, especially in this climate now, is that cork is a renewable resource. Since it comes from the bark on trees, this is a natural and environmentally friendly capsule for wines.
It has also been proven that cork serves better for wines that can be aged. Now, this is a two-part explanation. The first is that we have to understand that not all wines are meant to be aged. 95% of the wines in the market now are meant to be consumed within the first 2 years of being purchased, leaving only 5% to any sort of aging. To determine if a wine can be cellared, the wine has to have very specific specifications. The harvest year has to yield everything the grape needs: good growing conditions which typically means lots of sun and not a lot of rain, a frost-free winter, the right amount of PH, Brix and natural acids in the grape. If all of these demands can be met, we can talk about cellaring. Some of the best grapes suited for aging are Bordeaux blends, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Eiswein or Tokaji.
Cork is a porous material, and so if we have a bottle that meets the criteria for aging or maturation, the oxygen that seeps through the cork will help soften the tannins out and lessen the astringency of the wine--especially in red wines. This small ingress of oxygen will help round the flavors out in the wine, sending red wines into autumnal and earthy notes and whites into butterscotch and honey as they age. This will also affect the color of the wines, allowing red to turn into a brown or brick red, and whites to turn golden or amber in hue.
The downside to cork, and one of the largest ones, is because of the pores, they can hold onto bacteria. Trichloroanisole or TCA, lives in cork. If you’re storing your bottles correctly on their sides, you already know that this ensures the wine has direct contact on the wine. The side that is touching the wine is called the mirror. If the mirror on the cork in your bottle suffers from this level of bacteria, that will affect your wine. Typically, wines that are ‘corked’ will smell like mold or a wet dog. Wines that have cork need to be stored upside down or on their sides. If not, the cork will dry out and become brittle, allowing more oxygen than necessary to seep into the bottle and oxidize the wines.
Cork is also 2-3 times more expensive than a substitute capsule and can have varying levels of quality. While it is a renewable resource, it is also a limited one. With the demand for cork so high, eventually the level of what we can produce will not be able to keep up with demand of the trees and so the solution was to create other methods of sealing wines.
We look to use cork for wines that can age. A lot of different producers and wineries will use glass, rubber, plastic or a combo or cork and glue. These capsules, especially on wines like Sauvignon Blanc or dry rose, are nothing more than the consumer demand for the pop out of the bottle. These enclosures have no outcome on the wine, other than offering the aesthetic and appealing to those drinkers who tend to side eye screwcaps.
Screw caps are cost effective, cleanlier and cut down on bacteria in the bottle. For high demand and volume, this is the preferred enclosure. With the fact that 95% of the wines in the market are ready to drink now, a screwcap or a non-cork cap are the way to go. While these wines maybe can’t cellar for 10 plus years, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them! Even those with a screwcap can hang around for 2-3 years and still be okay to consume after that time period has passed.
Some of the largest drawbacks for screwcaps are that they’re recyclable but not biodegradable and that they’re known to be cheap! Price and the quality of wine is another rabbit hole entirely, but screwcaps do not mean your wine is cheap or bad, just like a cork doesn’t mean it’s exceptional or even good.
We’ll let you draw your own conclusions on the matter; but from where I stand, screwcap wines are just as good as anything that a synthetic cork or a real cork can offer us and it is only the preconceived notions that linger on wine that tell us differently. I invite you to go out and do your own comparisons on screwcap VS. cork and try to peel back the bias that one is better than the other.