Cap an’ Cork

“I think that as an industry, we still have a long way to go before we are in real touch with the consumer on this issue,” says Rusty Eddy of Glen Ellen Winery, which is continuing to test consumer acceptance of screw cap bottles.

Last year the winery released a small amount of Dolcetto with screw caps. Two weeks ago the Sonoma County winery began testing Chardonnay and White Zinfandel screw-caps in a Portland, Me., shop.

The specially packaged wines are being marketed side by side with the winery’s regularly packaged, cork-finished bottles. The screw cap bottles have postcards attached asking consumers for their reaction.

“The surprising thing is that we’ve gotten only about a dozen cards back thus far,” says Eddy, “but everyone has said that a cork is a better seal than a screw cap.”

Actually, there have been studies that indicate that this does not seem to be the case. Tests have been done at University of California at Davis and elsewhere showing that screw caps protect a wine better than natural cork, permit the wine to age just as well and cause fewer problems.

Paul Vandenberg, winemaker at Worden Washington Winery in the Northwest, has done as much research on synthetic corks and screw caps as anyone. He says: “I have experimented in my cellar for the last 10 years, and I have never had a bottle of wine closed with a screw cap that was ever less than it should be. But when the same batch of wine was bottled with corks, I’ve lost a number of bottles. I’ve talked to researchers all over the world, at Davis, Cornell in New York, Geisenheim in Germany, and I’ve never found anything wrong with screw caps.”

Eddy said Glen Ellen remains concerned about poor-quality corks, but has no immediate plans to institute wide use of the screw cap or synthetic corks.