Is it au revoir to the cork?

We were having lunch at the Water Grill, in downtown Los Angeles, and my guest -- Kerry Manahan-Ehlow -- had brought along a bottle of her 2001 Amusant Cabernet.

“You won’t need that,” she said when the waiter approached our table, corkscrew in hand. “Just twist the top off.”

He twisted and off it came -- capsule, cork and all.

“Now twist the capsule back on, without the cork,” she said. “It will still look like a bottle with a capsule, but the capsule now gives you a nondrip pour.”

The waiter did as instructed -- the capsule is a hard polymer instead of the traditional lead or anodized aluminum or wax -- and was soon grinning broadly. “That’s cool,” he said. “It would save me a lot of time and a lot of mess.”

That’s precisely what Manahan-Ehlow and her Napa-based colleagues at Gardner Technologies have in mind in marketing MetaCork.

MetaCork is a radical new wine closure created by Bill Gardner, a 60-year-old inventor and mathematical engineer who got fed up with corkscrews when he had trouble opening three bottles of wine at a dinner party.

“I went into my office the very next morning and began ... designing a revolutionary opener that would ultimately become the MetaCork,” he says.

Regular corks have long been made from oak bark -- more than two-thirds of them from trees in Portugal, most of the rest from Spain -- but winemakers and wine consumers have been complaining increasingly in recent years about “corked” wines.

Corked wines smell and taste moldy because corks are ideal conduits for the chemical compound 2,4,6 Tri-Chloro-anisole, or TCA. TCA generally comes from the interaction of natural microorganisms and the chlorine solutions used in cleaning corks and many winery storage areas.

The recent growth in premium wineries -- and the resultant demand for more corks -- led some cork producers to speed up production and relax their vigilance in guarding against contamination.

But a Chalone Wine Estates study of the issue last year found that cork bark processors no longer use chlorine agents. TCA can also taint wine, though, through oak barrels and when chlorine is used as a cleaning agent in wineries.

Estimates on the proportion of wines that are corked generally range from less than 1% to more than 10%, with the best estimates hovering around 3% to 5%.

Maybe I’m lucky -- or maybe I’m nasally challenged -- but I doubt that more than a fraction of 1% of the wines I’ve tasted have been corked. And despite being so mechanically inept that I can barely screw in a light bulb without an instruction manual, I’ve also become reasonably handy with a corkscrew -- by which I mean I rarely injure myself more often than every third or fourth bottle I open. So I’m probably not the best candidate for MetaCork.

But the folks at Gardner Technologies think MetaCork can play a big role in the wine industry’s long overdue effort to demystify wine for the average American.

I’m all for that. Intimidation, insecurity and uncertainty are among the major reasons that Americans continue to drink far less wine per capita than do the inhabitants of most of the rest of the Western world. We consume just over two gallons per capita here compared with almost 15 gallons in France and almost 13 in Italy. The United States ranks 34th among the 68 countries for which such statistics are available. Somewhat to my surprise, Manahan-Ehlow says the research she’s seen shows that the biggest intimidation factor for people who don’t drink wine regularly is the corkscrew.

Even people who use corkscrews as comfortably as they use a toothbrush often find themselves without one when they need it. And many wine drinkers, neophytes and oenophiles alike, often worry about wasting wine because they don’t finish the full bottle when they open it.

The MetaCork addresses both problems. After you unscrew the capsule/cork apparatus, you push the cork itself out through the top, which also pushes off a small, circular cap that’s thinner than a soda bottle cap; you can then screw the capsule back on for drip-free pouring and snap the cap back on top when you’re done so the wine can be kept closed until the next day.

Although the current version of the MetaCork includes a regular cork, Manahan-Ehlow says that’s just an “educational tool and a transitional technology” -- an obeisance to centuries of tradition. In next year’s version, she says, the cork will be synthetic -- polymer.

The cork challenge is on

Many other wineries are also using cork-shaped polymer plugs -- or different variations on a screw cap. The latter have long been used in Switzerland, and they’ve become especially popular of late in New Zealand and in Australia. They’re also now used in this country -- in varying degrees -- by Bonny Doon, Calera and Sonoma-Cutrer, among others.

But most wineries have resisted screw caps, in part because they aren’t convinced that screw caps will preserve wines and allow them to age as well as cork. But the biggest objection to screw caps involves image and prestige; historically, screw caps were used only on cheap jug wines.

Plumpjack has been using screw caps on its $150 reserve Cabernet for several years now, however, and with several other premium wineries beginning to experiment with them, resistance seems to be crumbling.

Enter MetaCork.

Last month, Gardner Technologies began test-marketing in California and Texas small amounts of several wines with MetaCork closures: 1,100 cases of 2002 Clos du Bois Sonoma County Chardonnay (retail price about $12); 1,100 cases of 2001 Fetzer Vineyards Barrel Select Merlot ($15.99); and 500 to 700 cases each of four wines from Amusant, which is owned by Manahan-Ehlow, her husband and two friends -- the 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon ($29.99), 2000 Cabernet ($29.99), 2001 Chardonnay ($19.99) and 2002 Sauvignon Blanc ($14.99).

Early returns seem quite favorable.

“We sold three cases of each wine and then ordered three more of each and sold them all in a month,” says Michael Zislis, proprietor of Rock’n Fish restaurant in Manhattan Beach.

“Our bartenders loved it because they could serve it so quickly, cap it and stick it in the refrigerator standing up -- which you can’t do with most wines because the cork protrudes too much when you stick it back in after the bottle’s open,” Zislis says.

But this convenience does not come without cost. Manahan-Ehlow says MetaCork will generally cost wineries 9 cents to 49 cents apiece, depending on the texture, colors and artwork they choose for the capsule and on the quantity they buy.

Although she insists this should not significantly increase a winery’s production costs, Doug Gillespie, U.S. brand director for Fetzer, estimates that for the test run, the winery spent about $1 or $2 more per bottle than it normally would to cover the cost of MetaCork and the specially threaded bottle it requires (plus the winery’s share of the sales and marketing campaign).

“If we like the results and roll it out across the country, that cost would come way down, but it would still cost us more than we pay now,” he says. “We’d have to weigh that against the increased sales we’d hope to get and then decide whether to absorb that extra cost or pass it on to the consumer.”

Mark Albrecht, national wine buyer for the 200 Cost Plus World Market stores and the biggest player in the MetaCork test-marketing so far, doubts that most consumers will be willing to pay extra for the new closure.

“There was more resistance than I would have anticipated at first but only until we explain how it works,” he says. “Then people think it’s a fantastic idea.”

Not fantastic enough for them to pay more for the same wine, he says. “I still think the wineries are going to have to eat the extra cost.”

Gardner Technologies has been wooing more than a dozen other wineries, here and abroad, for the next stage of its market test and hopes to land longtime industry leader Robert Mondavi Co., among others.

But Michael Mondavi, chairman of the company, says none of the Mondavi divisions has decided to participate yet.

“We’re always interested in various new types of closures, but this one involves a complex educational process that could be quite expensive,” he says.

Meanwhile, Mondavi says his company will continue to have a full-time employee in Portugal “making sure the raw cork we get is of the highest standard.”

Cork quality varies considerably. There are seven different qualitative grades among the 13 billion corks produced annually. But wines can taste and/or smell corked for reasons other than tainted corks, and as Mondavi points out, most wines today are technically so much better than in earlier generations that “you sometimes pick up mild cases of corked wine that you previously might have dismissed as just bottle variation” or flawed winemaking.

Maybe I should buy a case of Fetzer with MetaCork closures and test them all.

On the other hand, who wants to drink a case of Fetzer?

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.