WHYWine
CHATEAU D'O
Are you aware that practically all wines from New Zealand use screw caps? Or that 60 percent of Australian wines have abandoned the traditional cork? If the trend continues, will old-fashioned corks soon be visible only in museums and wine amateur's collections? Will your grandchildren come home one day and say: "Look grandfather, look what I found, a funny bottle with a cork. Let's not open it, let's keep it as a souvenir!"
Maybe in a few decades all that will be true, but not in our lifetime, you reply. After all, wineries of the Old World are faithful to cork. Can you imagine opening a bottle of Chateau Margaux with a twist and a little click?
Believe it or not, the people at Chateau Margaux are busy doing their own tests with screw caps. The director general of the famed chateau, Paul Pontallier, confirmed to the UK's Daily Telegraph that, "we have been doing tests for the past four or five years." He added, "It's too early to say whether we will use them, as our wines are made to be kept."
Jean Claude Boisset, a large scale producer of middle of the road Burgundy (Bouchard-Aine, Jaffelin, Morin Pere et fils, or Moreau Chablis) and a few special upscale wines like the Domaine de la Vougeraie, is already well into the screw cap. One third of the 200,000 bottles he produces annually do not use cork anymore, including an expensive 2005 Chambertin Grand Cru.
"We are convinced that screw tops are perfect for fine wines that need to age," said the man in charge of bottling at Boisset. "We are not saying that corks are bad, we are just saying that screw tops are better."
For a while it looked like plastic stops would do, but according to specialists they are only good with wine that must be consumed young. After a couple of years they tend to change shape and let in oxygen. They also can be hard to extract.
The change from cork to screw tops is dictated first of all by the need to avoid "corky" wines. The Laroche group, which makes some excellent Chablis, is now settling on screw tops. According to Renaud Laroche, "We had a lot of problems with cork stops in 2001. After that we conducted a lot of tastings and settled on screw tops - no car-makers would accept one in 10 of its cars not working."
Renaud Laroche considered screw tops are specially good for white wine. "Its advantage remains to be proven for red wines to be kept," he told Le Figaro daily.
A few weeks ago I received a long letter from a Swiss reader who threatened to send me to jail for having praised a wine from South Africa sold in boxes. I imagine he is not enthusiastic about screw tops either. But the trend is here. About seven billion bottles of wine are produced every year. In 2003 only 300 million came with a screw cap. In 2008 it will be at least 2.5 billon bottles.
The Daily Telegraph quoted Robert Parker who predicts that by 2015, cork will be a memory. Today some 15 percent of wine bottled with cork is bad. Wrote Parker: "The only exception will be great wines meant to age for 15 to 30 years that will still be primarily cork finished."
Keep your corkscrew, and even your old corks. Soon they will be valuable antiques. When looking at them in a few years it will be time to sing: "Thanks for the memories."
Email: chateaudo377@gmail.com
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