The Cork Question: Why Do They Use It?

Is the cork one reason wine sales are flat?

Think about it: Corks are a wicked way of sealing something meant be to enjoyed. To a lot of people they don’t represent a door but a barrier to pleasure.

In 1987, the E. & J. Gallo Winery, one of the savviest marketing companies in the business, chose to cork its classic red wine, Hearty Burgundy. For decades the wine had been in a screw-cap bottle and represented the best value in red wine around. At the same time, Gallo improved the quality of the Hearty Burgundy, making it even better than it had been.

No one knows whether these moves had any impact on sales. Certainly Gallo wasn’t expecting sales to jump because of this move. The reason for the cork was simply image. Gallo wanted people to recognize that the Hearty Burgundy was a fine wine.

The fact is, it was a fine wine, with either screw cap or cork. But imagine the consternation of long-time Gallo customers who bought a bottle:

“What’s for dinner tonight, Brutus?”

“Eggplant marinara. Did you bring home the wine?”

“It’s on the counter. The Gallo.”

“Hey, Lucretia, what is this? I’ve been twisting the top and nothing happens.”

“Uh-oh, look. No cap. It’s a cork! Now, why’d they go and do that? Oh, well, get the corkscrew.”

“Corkscrew? You know we don’t own a corkscrew.”

“Sure we do, Brutus. Under the sink, back in the corner.”

“Um, how do you use it?”

Snobbism and tradition are the two main reasons wine is packaged worse than any other product . . . with the possible exception of caviar. (Ever try to open one of those tiny jars of caviar?)

Could you imagine a catsup maker using a cork? Some wine bottles begin leaking all over your car even before you’re home. But the tradition-shackled wine industry sticks with a cork stopper, even though millions of people have never used a corkscrew and wouldn’t think of starting now.

Imagine a Madison Avenue pow-wow session:

“Here’s my proposed closure for wine bottles. It’s called a cork. Needs a special tool to get it out of the bottle. Sometimes it breaks off and falls into the wine. Sometimes it leaks. Sometimes it imparts a foul odor to the wine. Sometimes you can’t re-use it. Now, here’s the best part: It costs more than a screw cap!”

This guy would be peddling pencils in an hour.

Wine companies know many people avoid stepping up from screw-cap jug wine to fine wine merely because of the fear they’ll cut off a finger trying to use a corkscrew. Not that they will admit this; they simply say they like jug wine better.

Years ago, beer and soda were bottled with crown caps that required an opener, sometimes called a church key. The invention of the screw-off crown cap eliminated the need to find an instrument to get at the product. That was just the beginning; then came the pop top and the tab top.

Wine producers, meanwhile, stick with corks, fearing that anything else will imply the wine inside isn’t very good. Yet--and here’s the fascinating thing--one of the squirreliest problems the wine industry faces these days is corkiness. That is, wine spoilage due to bad corks.

Not only has the huge worldwide demand for cork driven the price of top-quality corks up by between a dime and 50 cents each, but lower and lower quality corks are being shipped here from Portugal and Spain. The result is a lot of spoiled wine.

In the last year, I have tasted thousands of wines. I’d guess that about 4% of the bottles were corked, smelling foully musty and dank.

I agree that the screw-cap has a lousy image, but in reality it is superior to cork in many ways. Think about it. It’s cheaper by far; it protects a wine from air spoilage better; the wine doesn’t have to be stored lying down; it’s easier to remove; it’s easily re-used; it can’t impart a corked aroma.

A couple of years ago, San Fernando Valley wine author (“Old Wine, Fine Wine?”) Roy Brady pulled a bottle out of his cellar for a group of wine lovers and poured it. He asked only if the wine was sound.

The wine wasn’t distinguished, we all agreed, but it was not oxidized; it was sound.

Brady then revealed that the wine was a bottle of nonvintage Cabernet from the defunct Ed Gillick’s Winery in Gilroy that he had bought for less than a dollar (a lot less) in the 1940s. The bottle had been stored, standing up, in Brady’s cellar for more than 40 years.

The bottle had a screw cap.

Yet some 10 million cases of White Zinfandel will be shipped to market this year, about 80% of it in bottles with corks. This represents about 80 million corks. Almost all of it will be consumed within hours of the purchase of the bottle. Seriously, do people who buy White Zinfandel care whether the closure is a cap or a cork?

Moreover, studies at the University of California at Davis indicate that even for wine that is to be aged the best closure is a screw cap. The studies show that a wine sealed with a screw cap ages just as well as one with a cork.

After that research became known a few years ago, a major aluminum company began running ads in wine trade publications trumpeting the merits of the cap--which it called a “roll-on closure” (which sounds better than “screw-cap”). But those ads haven’t been seen in a while. Nor has a major winery used a screw cap in fine wine.

One reason is that wine connoisseurs love the ritualistic removal of the cork, with all its pomp and tradition. It is their symbol of authenticity, even on a $2 bottle of wine. Snobbism is the last major hurdle standing in the way of a major shift to caps.

I’m not suggesting that Robert Mondavi Cabernet or Sonoma Cutrer Chardonnay eschew cork. Perish the thought. But I see nothing wrong with caps in lesser wines. Wines made to be consumed young, such as Gallo Hearty Burgundy, Sutter Home White Zinfandel, and the like.

At a time when consumption is falling and costs are rising, simple solutions like this one are ignored by wine makers, who seem bound to heap more pomposity on an already beleaguered product.