Bring on the Screwcaps! Evan Powell, April 8, 2007 PointlessWines.com In a Napa Valley winery tasting room, the attendant pours a premium Zinfandel and raves about what a wonderful wine it is. He pours samples to a roomful of visitors without realizing his bottle is corked--flawed by the all too common phenomenon of having been sealed with a tainted cork. Beaming with pride, he asks the woman standing next to me what she thinks of it. She hesitates, a bit uncomfortable, and says, “Well, it’s okay. I think I liked the last one better.”   I pull the attendant aside and quietly inform him that his bottle is bad. He frowns and pours himself a taste, swirling and sniffing deeply, trying to locate the offensive smell of a corked wine. He can’t get it. He tastes, and finally declares, “Yes, I get it on the palate, but not on the nose. It is subtle, but it is there.”   Unfortunately, it was not subtle at all. It was painfully obvious from the first whiff that the freshness of the fruit was missing. It had been replaced by the stale, moldy stench created by 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole, or TCA, a substance that forms as a reaction between a mold found in cork and clorine compounds used to clean the corks. In sufficient concentration, TCA absolutely ruins the wine. In smaller concentrations it reduces the natural aromas and tastes of the wine, making it uninteresting and flat, but not necessarily undrinkable.   Corked wines are a huge problem for the wine industry. One out of every ten bottles, in our experience, is compromised by a tainted cork. We routinely get samples sent to us from wineries for review, and open them with eager anticipation only to find that they’ve been infected by TCA. It is bad enough to suffer the loss of the wine. But the far larger problem is that most consumers don’t know the wine is flawed—they think that is the way it is supposed to taste! Even tasting room personnel and restaurant sommeliers sometimes have difficulty recognizing the compromising presence of TCA. So consumers and restaurant patrons—like the unsuspecting woman in the tasting room—know they have a wine they don’t care for, but they don’t know it is simply a bad bottle. When consumers decide they don’t like it much, they don’t complain to the winery or the retailer—they just don’t buy that wine again.	How much customer defection does a winery suffer by shipping wines that are, unbeknownst to them, already ruined by the cork? The damage is incalculable and enormous. Unfortunately, wineries get back only a small fraction of the wines that are actually damaged, so they are unable to gauge the magnitude of the problem. But out here on the front lines we are tasting hundreds of wines, and the problem is huge.   There are two ways to address this problem. One is to improve the cork sterilization procedures to the point where the problem becomes a rarity. The other is to move to alternative closures such as screwcaps and synthetic corks. Some claim that the cork industry is already making great strides to improve the situation in the face of rising competition from alternative closures. If it is, we see no evidence of it as of yet.   What we do know is that a wine with a screwcap will never be ruined by TCA. Forward-thinking wineries like Plumpjack Winery in Napa Valley have been putting their high-end Cabernets that sell for $150 a bottle in screwcaps. Cloudy Bay, featured on this site, puts their excellent Chardonnay in screwcaps. This is not primarily a cost saving measure for this caliber of wine—it is an attempt to ensure that the wine is delivered to the customer in a fresh and pure condition. These days, the screwcap is not the sign of a cheap wine—it is the guarantee of a fresh wine.   We say bring on the screwcaps! The more the better! Yes, there is a certain romance to the traditional cork, but we are paying a terrible price for that romance in wines that are less enjoyable than they otherwise would be. There is nothing worse than investing in a great wine to lay down in your cellar for ten years, and when you finally pull it out on that special day, you discover it was bad from the day you bought it.   There is no excuse for this anymore. Let's welcome the screwcaps, recognizing that they will guarantee we don’t suffer the insult of TCA. And as the screwcap gains market share, the cork industry really will respond to the competitive challenge in a meaningful way. Ultimately, we can look forward to the day when we can expect wines to be unspoiled no matter what type of enclosure is used.