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Closures – Tainted Love?
d=”standfirst”>Are the cork industry’s efforts too late to prevent the seemingly un-stopper-ble rise of the screw cap, asks Giles Fallowfield
Faulty or corked wines are just like the double-deckers on the 93-bus route. You don’t see one for several days, perhaps even weeks, and then several turn up in quick succession. Just as with buses that go past nose to tail when you’re not waiting for one, faulty wines tend to appear when it’s least convenient.
You are hot and bothered when you arrive home and the builders have covered the house in dust again and the only chilled bottle in the fridge turns out to be tainted. Or worse still, you’re away for the weekend, down to your last decent red and supper has just been put on the table. Likewise, corked Champagne only turns up at picnics. It’s a bore and, I suspect, it colours our perceptions about what percentage of wines are so afflicted.
If the various problems that spoil wine were less widespread, however, probably no one would have bothered to look beyond natural cork for alternative closures. Most would agree that, at its best, cork does a good job. Not many wine producers feel as strongly anti-cork as George Fistonich, owner and managing director of Villa Maria Estate, New Zealand’s largest privately owned wine company, who recently declared that as from the 2004 vintage he will be turning down orders rather than supplying his wines sealed under cork. But any winemaker who sees the product of their labours spoiled, or even just dulled, by the packaging it’s delivered in is likely to consider the available options.
The problem is that all the currently available options have pros and cons. Despite mountains of research that purport to demonstrate the clear superiority of one product over another, most closures have faults or a downside, at least for certain applications. And because this is an area of the wine business that has come under close scrutiny only for a decade or so and particularly over the past five years, many of the newest products haven’t been around long enough to show how efficient they are for wines likely to be laid down for consumption in two, three or perhaps 10 years’ time.
Despite all the negative publicity about cork and TCA contamination of wine, an issue exacerbated by the amount of time it took the major producers to take the problem seriously enough to address it, natural cork and various compound corks are still by far the commonest closures used. Amorim & Irmaos, based in northern Portugal, the largest cork producer in the world with a 25% share of the global market, estimates that out of the 15 billion bottles of wine filled every year, between 15% to 18% of them have alternative closures, “the overwhelming majority being plastic”. This figure of between 2.25 and 2.7 billion bottles has risen over the past five years when, according to Amorim’s director of marketing and communications, Carlos de Jesus, “approximately 500m bottles were closed with alternatives”.
Spurred into action by the burgeoning interest in other closures, Amorim has invested many millions of euros over the past three years in improving the quality control of the cork products it makes. It has looked at every stage of the production process, from the initial harvest by hand to the latest storage, processing and washing techniques, state-of-the-art automated punching and cutting and stringent laboratory testing of every batch of corks produced.
Amorim hasn’t just invested in quality control improvements in the production process, however. In an effort to address the principal complaint levelled at cork, its research and development team, led by Dr Miguel Cabral, has come up with a steam-cleaning system called ROSA, which it sees as a “complementary, curative measure to defeat TCA”. Amorim has had four units, designed to treat cork granules with this “steam distillation” technology, meant to remove most TCA contaminants, in commercial production during 2003 and says there will be seven by the end of 2004.
These advances have resulted in an alltime low for TCA complaints for the company’s TwinTop stoppers (composite corks with a sandwich of cork granules between two natural cork discs) some 800m of which were sold in the past 12 months, the company says. Only one complaint has been received so far, it claims. Its more expensive natural corks only undergo the ROSA treatment where TCA contaminants are found in the batches that are systematically tested, but plans to adapt the system for whole cork stoppers are under way. Recent bottling trials, using ROSA-treated corks, have also shown a significant reduction in the average incidence of TCA in the bottles of wine after 12 months, Amorim says.
Sabaté, the second largest cork producer in the world and part of the Oeneo wine group which includes the barrel-maker Seguin Moreau, has been a little more cautious about the claims it makes for its Diamond process which has been jointly developed with the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) since 1997. The process uses supercritical carbon dioxide (CO 2) extraction to selectively remove from raw cork certain chemical compounds that can contribute to what Sabaté calls “unwanted sensory deviations in bottled wine”.
A decision to begin industrial scale production was only made by Sabaté Diosos Group in December 2002 following a successful trial led by a panel of respected UK wine trade professionals in which prototype cork closures were treated with supercritical carbon dioxide to extract the chemical compound, 2,4,6 Trichloroanisole (TCA). The new treated composite corks will only become widely commercially available from mid-2005.
However, UK supermarket, Sainsbury’s, introduced what it calls “the first new TCA treated natural corks” for bottles of Australian Petit Verdot in May of this year. Allan Webb, general manager for the wines, beers, spirits and tobacco sector at Sainsbury’s says that, “This taint-free natural cork closure has been developed after many years of research at Sabaté and two years of extensive trials by Sainsbury’s technical team.”
Interestingly, for its part, Sabaté openly concedes that there is no perfect closure that suits every wine, and parent company Oeneo, which already distributes Stelvin screw caps in some parts of the world, is apparently in the process of setting up a new operation that will offer a range of closure solutions including screw caps, plastic and technical closures plus composite and natural corks.
Whether either major cork manufacturer convinces screw cap-using wine companies to return to cork for any of their wines in the future remains in doubt. It is, on the whole, the New World producers who have been quickest to embrace the screw cap. This is particularly true in New Zealand where the “screw cap wine seal initiative” was launched as far back as September 2001 by 27 medium-sized wineries spread across the country, following the earlier initiative by top Riesling producers in the Clare Valley.
Since then, more of the largest Kiwi producers have also embraced the screw cap and, as we report in the New Zealand feature on page 26, Nobilo, the second largest winery there has put its biggest volume lines, including White Cloud, under Stelvin for the first time, while Montana, the largest NZ wine company, is relaunching its Stoneleigh range (previously Corbans) under screw cap. The Montana brand itself will also be bottled under Stelvin for the first time this October.
Other top New World brands like Jacob’s Creek, Gallo – introduced for its Turning Leaf range in April 2004 – Hardy’s and Rosemount, all at least offer a screw top option for some of their biggest selling lines. But screw top has also made inroads in some, perhaps, more surprising places.
Top Chablis producer, Michel Laroche, has been using alternative closures for several years for wines from the South of France. His Languedoc wines use Nomacork, switching from Integra last year, because the smoother corks are easier to get in and out of bottles and the smooth surface is better for printing the Laroche logo on. Nomacork is also used for the Laroche (né goce) Chablis range.
But last year, Michel Laroche made the groundbreaking decision to offer all his Grands Crus Chablis (from the 2002 vintage onwards) in screw caps to all of his markets. There was no obligation; importers were free to choose, depending on how ready they felt their market was for this innovation. They were also free to order a percentage of their allocation in screw cap if they wished to dip their toe in gently. The results were perhaps predictable. Markets like the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, Holland, New Zealand and Australia all said yes to screw caps immediately. The Japanese market, curiously, decided to take only top of the range Réserve de l’Obédience in screw cap and retain the other Grands Crus in natural cork. Even the French market showed some interest and Grand Cru Laroche Chablis is now served under screw cap in three-star Michelin restaurant La Co?te Saint Jacques in Joigny.
Positive feedback has been such that Michel Laroche, who wanted to demonstrate that his initial decision had been made for qualitative and not economic reasons, has now had to add in Chablis Saint Martin and Chablis Premier Cru Les Vaudevey to the screw cap offer. As the first French producer to opt for screw caps in his Grands Crus, Michel has been invited to speak at the New Zealand Screw CapSymposium in November this year.
As the Laroche decision to adopt Nomacork for his Languedoc wines neatly demonstrates, customer convenience is a major factor in any decision on selecting a closure and this is what leading UK supermarket Tesco has found with its “unwind” screw cap range, which now boasts nearly 120 different styles of wine. Tesco is apparently pressing ahead with its stated aim of getting more than half of its entire wine selection – currently put at around 750 different styles – under screw cap closure by the end of next year.
And why is this, I hear you ask? Have Tesco customers phoned the company in their thousands to applaud the lack of tainted wine in screw cap bottles? Not exactly, but we can reveal something far more significant. People find them easier to open. It’s really that simple – and that’s perhaps the biggest threat to natural cork.