Wine Drinkers - Natural cork, synthetic cork or screw on caps?

[JHCC]

As awful as it sounds, I have bought wine in a box. The wine itself is unremarkable, but the logic of using an airtight foil bag with a tap held in a box is good.
I wouldn't want a guest to see it though, let alone drink it. I only drink it for the health benefits (resveratrol). I sip a small glass of it near the end of my weightlifting sessions while listening to classical music. It tastes OK under those conditions.

An old college friend recently had this to say about box wine:

'I kept the bladders from the wines boxes from last night's CD release party so the kids could blow them full of air and jump on them. We put a 2x4 on them and jumped. X wasn't heavy enough, so I did the jumping. On the last one, the spigot popped out and hit the boy in the eye. Luckily, it was only a flesh wound and we didn't have to go to the hospital. We smelled so much like wine that Child Protective Services would have to get involved."

 

[djh]

I much prefer natural cork but I'm fairly confident that screwcaps will become the closure of choice in years to come. I am yet to drink a bottle of wine older than 7 or 8 years from under a screwcap but the real test will be to try a quality bottle with perhaps 20 years of age on it.

 

[SteveWY]

I'm glad someone else opened up this "box"!!!! That said, I find the synthetic corks more utilitarian than cork but cork still gets a thumbs up for aesthetics.

 

[Wishoot]

I dislike messing around with bottle stops and frankly, I think the screw top keeps wine fresher.

 

[Edcculus]

I don't really care either way. Screw caps are nice, especially when you are in a situation with no bottle opener.

As far as box wine goes, just like in the bottle, there are good and bad ones. Some can be good, esp if you just need a table wine. Plus side is that shipping costs go WAY down because bottles weight so much. On top of that, there is a place near my house that sells wine (and beer) on tap, and puts them in growlers for you to take home. The price on a growler of wine is great because they are getting it from wineries in kegs. Wineries can save a ton by not buying bottles.

There can be a nice aesthetic to bottles and natural corks, but in the end, its just something to hold the wine. Probably 80% of us aren't buying wine to age anyways, so who really cares what it comes in as long as the product inside is good.

 

[Mr5x5]

no preference

 

[Legion]

Screw caps. Almost all Australian wine now has the screw cap, even a lot of the expensive stuff. For a long time we were reluctant to accept it, screw cap = cheap and nasty. But the thing is, the screw cap actually seals the bottle better than a cork. I still enjoy pulling a cork (and I keep a couple of pretty cool cork screws for when I get the chance) but most of my wine now has a screw cap.

 

[Doc4]

Synthetic or screw-cap.

Yes, real cork is a nice experience, but not when it taints the bottle of expensive wine you have been carefully cellaring for a decade or two.

 

[jazzguy]

There are two kinds of synthetic corks. The Supreme Corq, which is molded, does not work well at all in my experience. It passes too much oxygen. The Nomacorc, which is two types of plastic manufactured in an extrusion process, performs better. Those however are often difficult to remove from bottles. I find the screwcap superior to both of them and to natural cork and we put it on every bottle we make no matter the price.

 

[jazzguy]

Just an FYI Stelvin is actually a particular brand of screwcap, developed by Alcan packaging. The name for the screwcap wine closure is ROPP: roll-on-pilfer-proof. If you don't see the Stelvin logo printed on the cap it isn't a Stelvin, even if it looks the same.

Having over 400 bottles in a cellar with stock going back to the late 80s I am a BIG fan of Stelvin (screw caps). Whilst lacking the "romance" of cork it means a LOT less booze getting poured down the sink for being corked.

 

[ReAndyMator]

In personal preference order :

(1st) Screwcap
(2nd) Agglomerate cork (not on list)
(3rd) Natural Cork
(4th) Synthetic cork

My experiments in the lab show that synthetics don't work as well as you'd hope. Unless the bottle bore is perfect, it doesn't do half as good a job of sealing the bottle as a natural cork. Agglomerates give the same sort of naturalness as a real cork, but without the TCA risks (well, significantly reduced). Screwcaps (all stelcaps are ROPPs, not all ROPPs are Stelcaps, as pointed out in the previous post) are my preferred variant though. The wad does a good job of sealing, without requiring a perfect bore, and does a good job of eliminating most of the TCA risk. And you don't need a corkscrew to open it. And you can reseal it easily (not that that happens very often!)

 

[~Rocco~]

When I was much younger I sometimes enjoyed watching my Grandfather & my Uncles making homemade wine...(they always used natural corks when bottling).

So I'll have to vote for natural corks.

 

[rajagra]

I'm not sure why, but there's something deeply unpleasant about putting a corkscrew into a synthetic cork.

 

[WhiteKnight]

Screw caps. Almost all Australian wine now has the screw cap, even a lot of the expensive stuff. For a long time we were reluctant to accept it, screw cap = cheap and nasty. But the thing is, the screw cap actually seals the bottle better than a cork. I still enjoy pulling a cork (and I keep a couple of pretty cool cork screws for when I get the chance) but most of my wine now has a screw cap.

Without the intent to sound like a wine-bore (which I probably am): this is only true for wines that do not need bottle ageing. If you would your wine to develop complexity in the bottle pursuant to a slow (albeit still very poorly understood) oxidation process, natural cork is until now the best option available. Currently, high-end châteaux in Bordeaux are conducting experiments to evaluate how wines age under screwcap closure. Also, experiments are being conducted with semi-permeable screwcap closures.

 

[buffdaddy]

There's been debate about this for years. Really up until recently, wines with screw caps were usually considered cheap and not high quality which I don't think is the case anymore.

On my local PBS station nightly news show there is a weekly segment with a great local Sommelier named Alpina Singh. Viewers send in questions about wine, beer and other spirits and this question was posed to her recently.

She basically said she likes screw caps. She also went on to say screw caps eliminate the chance for the wine to develop "cork taint" and a screw cap makes the wine last longer and taste fresher. For me I can't really taste the difference but for people with a more refined palet they may think the contrary.

But in terms of convience I think a screw cap is better especially if you open a bottle and don't finish it. Getting that cork back in can be a major pain if you don't have one of those re-cork tools or pumps that suck the air out of the bottle.


Here's also a write she did in the Chicago Tribune a couple years back about screw tops: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...402_1_screw-caps-cork-taint-new-zealand-wines

 

[ReAndyMator]

It doesn't eliminate the chance of cork taint, but it will significantly reduce the chance....

I had to deal with a customer complaint of a screwcap bottle that turned out to be TCA contamination... The Scotch Whisky Association did a ton of tests (whisky suffers from TCA contamination too) and found contamination in vat samples - ie, ones that have never been anywhere near a cork...

 

[jazzguy]

TCA can also form on wood. It is thought that it is sometimes inside of barrels. However, if the wine is not tainted when it goes in the bottle it's not going to be if it's sealed with a screwcap.

It doesn't eliminate the chance of cork taint, but it will significantly reduce the chance....

I had to deal with a customer complaint of a screwcap bottle that turned out to be TCA contamination... The Scotch Whisky Association did a ton of tests (whisky suffers from TCA contamination too) and found contamination in vat samples - ie, ones that have never been anywhere near a cork...

 

[Psion]

I'm good with any of them.

 

[ReAndyMator]

TCA can also form on wood. It is thought that it is sometimes inside of barrels. However, if the wine is not tainted when it goes in the bottle it's not going to be if it's sealed with a screwcap.

You certainly get tainted barrels. They smell nasty. Amcor claim that stelcaps guarantee against TCA contamination, but the jury's still out on that, scientifically. Interestingly, I'm actually at a meeting about this very subject on Friday.....

 

[JHCC]

For the laymen among us, here are the Wikipedia articles on TCA and cork taint:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4,6-Trichloroanisole

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_taint