Word: corks
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...Screwcap," Bonny Doon Vineyard's online video extolling the virtues of screwcapped wine, a faceless sommelier prepares for an evening at work, fastening his flashy cufflinks in a dimly lit boudoir. He reaches into a drawer full of corkscrews, scoops them up, and casts them into the trash. "Le cork est mort! (The cork is dead!)," the sommelier proclaims in a campy French accent. "Vive le screwcap...
Camp and bad French aside, the lighthearted marketing video articulates a watershed moment in the global wine industry: after hundreds of years of tradition, more and more winemakers are turning away from cork closures - and oenophiles are finally getting used to the idea. Bonny Doon, a boutique winery south of San Francisco, had used Portuguese cork for 19 years, but was losing 0.5% to 2% of its wine to "taint" - the unmistakably moldy or musty smell and taste of a contaminated wine, caused by a compound called TCA, which is sometimes found in cork. So, the winery decided to make...
Mediterranean cork producers would probably not appreciate his sentiment. Their product, which has been plugging bottles at least since the days of ancient Pompeii, has gone unchallenged for centuries as the world's favorite wine stopper. But like many long-lived gastronomic rites, the custom ran into trouble when globalization kicked into high gear. In the 1990s, world wine production exploded, and to meet demand, cork makers started shipping products that, to many, weren't up to snuff. Increased concern about cork taint led wineries like Bonny Doon to look for new ways to seal their wares. Between...
...cork industry has been scrambling to pick up the pieces. Amorim, the world's largest cork-stopper producer, based in Portugal, where more than 30% of the world's cork is grown, has invested $58 million in improving its operations since 2000. But there are more than 600 cork producers in Portugal alone, and quality control is a challenge. "My enemy is not an [aluminum] wine-stopper," says Carlos de Jesus, Amorim's marketing and communications director. "My problem is a cork stopper that ends up at your table tomorrow and it could stink. The guy making bad quality stoppers...
...They hijack the bacterium's genetic machinery and within minutes start to pump out hundreds of copies of themselves. When enough progeny build up inside the cell, the phages produce an enzyme that chews through the cell wall, causing it to explode with the force of a popping champagne cork and spew out the viral intruders...