Word: maestro
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...producers like Michel Drappier, the man behind Champagne Drappier, the Maestro seems sensible enough, but he remains attached to the "weight of history and image" behind the traditional Champagne cork. "I'll admit I find this system rather seductive. I have no qualitative arguments against it," he says. "But I have one big reserve - I feel the romantic side of Champagne is badly bruised...
...Despite the mystique the Champenois attach to that pop and whiz of the cork, theirs has long been a love-hate relationship - one that the Maestro aims to help smooth over. While the Maestro's ease of use is certainly a selling point, the new stopper's real advantage over cork closures is as a solution to TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole), the molecule that when present in cork is responsible for wine taint. "TCA is the great scourge of wine," says Peter Liem, the Épernay-based founder of champagneguide.net. "The problem is grave enough that it's becoming...
...those taking the next step, to noncork stoppers, it's not just about TCA. Duval-Leroy says another reason she's turning to the Maestro is that she doesn't want to gamble her production on the long-term survival of the world's cork forests. "It's frankly worrisome to think that you have a million bottles in the cellar and there could be an ecological catastrophe and you'd have no alternative closures," she says. (See "Champagne's Bubbly Personalities...
...Bruno de Saizieu, sales and marketing director of Maestro-maker Alcan, is confident that cork's reign will end one day. Judging from the success of Alcan's Stelvin wine screw cap - whose global sales have skyrocketed from 300 million in 2003 to 3 billion today - De Saizieu thinks Champagne will eventually adopt the Maestro system as well. "When we started the Stelvin, there were an enormous number of people who were outraged," he says. "Today, like them or not, screw caps are no longer questioned as viable alternatives around the world. In Champagne it will be the same...
...Champagne-producing majority, though, a wait-and-see attitude seems de rigueur. "Even if I'm very convinced, we're going to need some time before we adopt these systems wholesale," says producer Drappier, who has tested both the Mytik Diamant and the Maestro. After all, he asks, what would Champagne Drappier's most famous client have thought? "Charles de Gaulle liked his Champagne bottles as simple as a jar of Mom's homemade jam, so I think he'd have been slow to warm to anything too gadgety." If success for Champagne's cork innovators depends on pleasing public...