Corks v Screwcaps: Unforgiven

Alastair Marshall

I am an unrepentant advocate of the screw cap closure and am quite happy to ‘click’ rather than ‘pop’ when it comes to the evening tipple at Chateau Marshall.

This is a point of view derived over a long period (30 years plus) of enjoying wine. I say enjoying guardedly as the years have been liberally punctuated with disappointingly ‘corked’ bottles. At home and in the tasting room we reckoned that three to five per cent of bottles suffered from cork taint. This was hardly surprising as the cork industry was a complacent monopoly that had shockingly slack controls over its sanitary process which amounted to little more than dumping the cork in a sulphur bath, giving it a boil and away you go. 3% to 5% was a generally accepted level of failure in the wine trade !

I have always thought – what if Marks and Spencers had the same problem with their underwear suppliers, how long would the buying public put up with a product where the elastic gave out on a regular basis ? If that had been the case I do not think that M&S would be as much of  presence, if any, on our high streets as it is today.

Along comes the screw cap and problems of cork taint disappear overnight. Championed by countries like New Zealand or regions like the Clare Valley in South Australia I soon got used to enjoying wine free from cork taint. The practice has spread and it is far from uncommon to find that the wine you have just bought is a screwcap and even expensive red wines now come with this closure. This activity tends to be from the less traditional New World producers but bit by bit it is spreading through Europe. The flight from the unreliability of cork has had its downside. The emergence of the luminously coloured plastic cork !  Coloured or not these things are an aberration. Lumps of plastic that are impossible to prise off a corkscrew and once disposed of have, I imagine, a half life of hundreds of years ! The archaeologists of 2510 will be cursing us. I hate them.

The cork industry reeled under the assault of the screwcap. They lost markets but most of all they lost trust and respect. This spurred an almighty clean up of their systems and I can honestly say that I notice a lot less corked bottles nowadays. Bravo to them.. but the problem has not gone away it has only been reduced.

Part of their campaign to rehabilitate themselves has been to enlist the aid of the worthy RSPB who have declared that cork forests are a vital habitat to a myriad of bird life and the rare Iberian lynx and unless we support the poor cork growers then we will be responsible for the foul death of the birdies and the kitty. I react badly to this sort of moral blackmail, I see the value in their arguments but feel that if the wine industry has a problem with their product then the sensible thing to do would be for cork producers to seek out new uses, new markets rather than berating the old.

The green issue is frequently cited as a big plus point for cork. Yes, in an ideal world, I would like to see extensive well maintained cork forrests supplying untrammelled product to happy vignerons who’s customers merrily ‘pop’ perfect wine into their glasses. However how ‘green’ is it to load a ship full of corks sail it over to the southern hemisphere only to be stuck into a load of bottles and sailed back over here !

I am at heart a romantic and the process and sound of removing a cork from a bottle, that I have nurtured in my cellar, is all part of the ritual of enjoying a good wine. I will continue to enjoy corks but I have not yet forgiven them.

Alastair Marshall
Senior Wine Buyer