The Coad Curse

originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Isn't the reduction issue only a longer-term one for screwcaps, though?
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I don't have a lot of experience, but friends who are agitated about the question allege that problems surface in 6 months or so. Or that the wines are heavily pre-treated with copper to remove thiols and sulfides, stripping them of flavor and sometimes leaving hazardous levels of copper behind.

On the long-term thing, I'm less sure. It is certainly the case that the best older wines from a box are the ones with the tightest corks, so I would think that a tight seal would be best. There is less data, of course. There was no '21 Montrose under screwcap.
 
I am a bit partial to the notion that there is something special about cork--maybe a bolus of oxygen from cork compression in the bottling line, maybe this gets released on a helpful timescale (weeks, months?), but then a tight seal. Leaky closures do not seem like the answer to anything expected to age.
 
The research I've glanced at (constant reminder: not a chemist) seems to indicate that the oxygen is trapped in the cork, some of which is released into the wine, and then -- given a proper seal -- that's it. As you say, later oxygen transfer isn't usually viewed as a good thing. But the reduction in capped wines, which I admit I haven't experienced nearly as often as certain folks, is widely viewed to be the "fault" of a leak-free seal. There's debate about whether or not this can be controlled at bottling, or whether those controls don't create a different problem, but surely there's an answer to this. Either the seal should be perfect, or it should be something less than that. Maybe it differs from wine style to wine style.

But again, any sort of seal is replicable by screwcaps, and with far more precision and reliability. The unanswered question is: how much oxygen? And with all the arguments that have been going on for years, I find it amazing no one seems to know. Until there's an answer, 100% surety with a closure isn't going to be possible.
 
Two things confuse me about the reductiveness complaint with screwcaps; firstly, that I've never tasted it, and I've tasted reductiveness many times in cork-finished wines (French non-oak whites often show at least a hint of it); and secondly, as Steve Edmunds pointed out, there is at least one variant of Stelvin with a more absorbtive liner, and as far as one can tell no reason why there shouldn't be a whole range of them.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
It is certainly the case that the best older wines from a box are the ones with the tightest corks
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It would certainly make sense, but sometimes the bottle with the most ullage has the most life. That was my experience with the '71 Huet that came around way back when. Also some 70's Burgundy and old Savennieres. The worst looking bottles tasted best!

I agree about synthetics: okay for drink now wines. Honestly though I prefer corks overall. And I've had mixed results with synthetics left to age, some are fine others are obviously oxidized. Screwcaps seem to last forever.
 
I've tasted reductiveness many times in cork-finished wines
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Certainly.

there is at least one variant of Stelvin with a more absorbtive liner, and as far as one can tell no reason why there shouldn't be a whole range of them.
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Again, I believe the problem is that there's as yet no actual data on how much oxygen, or what rate of ingress, is preferable. Without that data, it's difficult to commit.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
I am a bit partial to the notion that there is something special about cork--maybe a bolus of oxygen from cork compression in the bottling line, maybe this gets released on a helpful timescale (weeks, months?), but then a tight seal. Leaky closures do not seem like the answer to anything expected to age.
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Bolus...good word.

I hadn't heard this two-stage theory of cork oxygen permeability, but it has some appeal. I had thought it had been demonstrated that not only were corks leaky, but that their leakiness varied over an order of magnitude. Is this not the case?
 
originally posted by Kay Bixler:
originally posted by SFJoe:
It is certainly the case that the best older wines from a box are the ones with the tightest corks
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It would certainly make sense, but sometimes the bottle with the most ullage has the most life. That was my experience with the '71 Huet that came around way back when.
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Yah, my last bottle from Garnet sucked in its cork in the fridge, but was still sublime.

But most of the wines you cite are the ones that need the most air when opened, just by the by.
 
Arjun, the variability has certainly been established. But I think it's still believed that perfectly-functioning corks do not leak.
 
originally posted by Thor:
Arjun, the variability has certainly been established. But I think it's still believed that perfectly-functioning corks do not leak.
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I believe that it's also been shown that corks at no stage are actually permeable to oxygen until they lose macroscopic integrity. Rather, oxygen ingress begins with the loss of the seal between cork and bottle, caused by a loss of elasticity in the cork. AFAICT, that's the same reason that synthetic corks don't function well in the long term: they lose elasticity more quickly than most corks do.

Mark Lipton
 
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