Waiter, There’s a Plastic Stopper in My Wine

It’s a ritual for anniversaries, birthdays and gatherings of good friends: The waiter comes to your table, presents the bottle of wine, then removes the cork and places it on the table for inspection.

But what if the cork isn’t cork?

About 50 million bottles of wine now on the market contain plastic corks, which come in different colors and are pulled out with a corkscrew.

Wineries are turning to synthetic corks because a small percentage of the natural variety leak, crumble when removed or leave wine with a musty taste.

“Three-quarters of wine drinkers don’t mess with the cork when we give it to them,” said Brian Douglas, general manager of McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurant in Portland. “They seem to think, ‘OK, why are you leaving this thing on the table?’ ”

The idea is to check the cork for damage or an odor that might signal a problem with the wine. The waiter then pours a sample to be checked for visual appeal, bouquet and taste.

But there’s no reason to check the plastic corks because damage is unlikely and they won’t retain much of the wine’s fragrance, said Marla Rosenberg, sales director of SupremeCorq, which makes plastic corks in Kent, Wash.

People don’t always know it’s plastic.

“It’s hard to see in a dimly lit French restaurant that it’s not real cork,” said Jack Jenkins, general manager of the Nob Hill restaurant at the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco. “After they do look at it, there doesn’t seem to be a reaction one way or another.”

SupremeCorq, founded in 1993, has made customers of 200 of the 2,000 wineries in the United States and has made inroads elsewhere, including Italy, Australia, New Zealand and Chile.

“France is going to be a tough market because of tradition and ethnocentricity,” Rosenberg said.

Still, with an estimated 15 billion bottles of wine corked annually worldwide, Rosenberg said the potential for the plastic stopper is nearly unlimited.

Winemaker Joe Dobbes of Willamette Valley Vineyards near Turner, Ore., decided to use plastic corks after discovering wine was tainted by cork problems in as many as 6% of his bottles.

“I really think it’s the future of the industry,” he said. “But it’s something that not everybody is going to use.”

With a bow to tradition, Dobbes is keeping natural corks in his highest-priced wines while using plastic in moderately priced bottles.

Christine Pascal, executive director of the Oregon Wine Advisory Board, said one-third of Oregon’s 116 wineries have gone to plastic stoppers. But she admitted that there’s something attractive about cork.

“There’s a certain romance to cork,” she said. “It’s a nice experience to touch and smell it.”

But Pascal said there’s no arguing with the 50 million gallons of wine a year ruined nationally because of problems with natural corks, which may let in air or contain mold or chemicals that will hurt the taste.

Most natural wine corks are produced in Portugal from oak bark, as they have been for centuries.

“To me, there is a persona of quality associated with cork, a natural product,” said quality assurance director Michelle Bowen of Juvenal Direct Inc., of Napa, Calif., which imports cork stoppers.

She said fewer than two wine bottles out of 100 have cork problems.

“It lasts forever. It is almost alive. It came from a living organism and has living cells infused with a component that is like natural wax that repels water and gives life to the cork. It mostly keeps oxygen out, allowing only enough so that the wine ages properly.

“I’ve seen bottles of wine with cork in them that are 60 years old, and the wine was still wonderful.”

She questioned how well wine would age in a bottle containing a plastic cork and said she has even heard of a corkscrew snapping off in a plastic cork.

But Dobbes said there’s no getting around the uniform quality of plastic.

“It’s the second best thing to the screw cap,” he said. “And you know that will never be universally accepted.”