I muster up the courage to try...

Oswaldo,
As Thor points out earlier in this thread, you are well to read Tim's posts and just peruse the other stuff. Some folks will split a hair repeatedly.
Best, Jim
 
The unfortunate thing is that there are good, necessary questions to ask about reduction and copper use, but White is such an unsympathetic and unreasonable extremist on the issue -- and even the most casual observer soon notices how much of the paralyzing blizzard of rhetoric is actually about Paul White, not closures -- that he's not an effective medium for those questions.

When one enters a thread with (paraphrased) "I don't have time for more than a few words" and then proceeds to produce the director's cut of Infinite Jest, laden with grandiose and gratingly-worded attacks on pretty much everyone who does not agree with 100% of what he says, has lost his audience and any ability to convince he might otherwise have had. And his inability to answer Eric LeVine's simple question on the ratio of closure to bottle in terms of carbon imprint looks a lot more like "I don't want to answer this" than "I can't answer this" after the first ten- or twenty-thousand words of transparent avoidance.

I realize that I'm running the risk of drawing either him or his freshly-minted acolyte to this discussion. Apologies in advance.
 
Thor,
I think he and Gilman are both pretty hard to read but, as you say, they do have some good questions. Hence, I speed read their stuff.
Tim, OTOH, seems to have a more balanced approach (within his stated bias') and is fairly readable.

I think there are more than a few people who use 200 words to say what could be said in 3 - and cyberspace seems to lend itself to that.
Best, Jim
 
Oh, I'm in no position to criticize verbosity, to be sure. But I'm interested in this subject, and very nearly could not force myself to get through most of what White (especially) and Gilman wrote. Not just because it's overly long, but because it's so...fanatic. Eventually, with White, I did give up and resort to scanning, because it's not like he hasn't been writing or saying the same thing over and over for a long while now, and generating what must be at least 95% of the content on his side of this issue.
 
originally posted by Thor:
The unfortunate thing is that there are good, necessary questions to ask about reduction and copper use, but White is such an unsympathetic and unreasonable extremist on the issue -- and even the most casual observer soon notices how much of the paralyzing blizzard of rhetoric is actually about Paul White, not closures -- that he's not an effective medium for those questions.
Click to expand...
Indeed. It's rather like trying to gain some insight into recent geological discoveries from a creationist...
G
 
originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
I muster up the courage to try...
Click to expand...

GREAT title!!!

But I digress...

I tasted the Muster wines and those of a few of their fellow travelers at Vie Vinum in Vienna earlier this year and they were probably the most interesting wines I tasted over the couple of days I spent in the overheated, too-humid, pre-air-conditioning palace in which the event transpired. They were on their own little island in the back of a crystal chandeliered ballroom, ostracized from the rest of the "normal" Styrians (but not that they were complaining about it or anything).

What they were complaining about was that they didn't get a lot of respect from their fellow winemakers in terms of what they were doing with biodynamic farming and orange wines. Muster and the other exiles on this island are members of a group called Schmecke das Leben and they're all messing about with variations on the theme of amphorae, burying barrels in the ground for 18 months, and whatever the hell they can do that pisses "normal" winemakers off but results in some fascinating wines (Morillon or not).

From the standpoint of true wine geekiness, they were indeed the most interesting, most compelling, and most outr Styrian wines I ran across while in Vienna (what the hell, I'll go out on a limb and state that they were the most interesting Austrian wines I tasted during the show)(there was some really freaky stuff from like, Bosnia that'd put hair on your teeth they were so freaky, but that's a different story for a different time). However, were I dining at Schnattl or La Boheme, I probably wouldn't select the Schmecke das Leben producers' wines to accompany the schnitzel if I were given the opportunity to order a Tement Zieregg or Sattlerhof Kranachburg instead. I liked them for what they were trying to accomplish more than I liked them as wines I wanted to drink with food. But that's just me.

From what I could learn from them at Vie Vinum, none of the group members have importation relationships in the USA. Their pricing isn't extraordinarily high, but they're not giving the stuff away, particularly not the amphora bottlings. If I were an importer of Dressnerian proportions I'd probably consider bringing them into the country, but not being an importer and not having a lot of discretionary income to toss about, I'm unlikely to appear as the importer of any of the Schmecke das Leben gruppe. More's the pity.

-Eden (how did the conversation wind up being about oxidative Stelvinization anyway?)
 
I met with Tim Keller of Vinperfect (www.vinperfect.com) this morning over coffee.
The material presently used for the linings of screw-caps (the material that actually forms the seal) is metalized PET. He is experimenting with other bio-plastics and materials, all of which will be biodegradable.
Essential, a layer containing a small circle of holes is laminated onto a gas-permeable layer; the more holes in the circle, the greater the rate of permeability. While the default rate of permeability is 5 ppm over 5 years, there will be closures that will allow a winemaker to choose differing rates on either side of the default. Point being, each wine is different.
Tim anticipates that the end-user cost will be about $.25 per closure for small orders when the product is ready for commercial release. Release is anticipated in Australia during next year's time of bottling and in this country shortly thereafter. However, Tim is quick to point out that he will not release until he is satisfied with quality and reliability.

As to leeching; since the materials are biodegradable, no guarantee can be made that long term leeching of the materials will not occur. However, he notes that it would be no more than normal corks would incur and that the materials used are, essential, inert.
By long term, we were using an example of 25 years.

My impression was that Tim believes that every consumer should be able to rely upon the fact that any wine closed with his caps will last 5 years without question. Thereafter, longevity and development are a function of the component parts of the wine. Even so, the closure will not break down after 5 years but rather, will continue to allow oxygen ingress (and probably nitrogen egress) for many years to come.

Tim is the first to acknowledge that long term studies of his linings are non-existent. However, he believes that the science behind the project and the testing done to date are sufficient for him to be confident in making his claims. There is some technical data on the website and and e-mail sign-up list for those who wish periodic updates.

Personally, I plan on keeping up with this project as I believe that cork is not the ideal closure for wines, even those to be aged. However, I feel that current screw-caps are best used on wines that will be drunk within 2-3 years of purchase. And further, that red wines under screw-cap are not for long term aging.
So I see these liners as possibly filling a point somewhere between the two.

Best, Jim
 
Thanks, Jim. It's interesting work, to be sure.

So far, my trials of purchased-on-site and self-cellared New Zealand pinot noir under screwcap, mostly 8-10 years at this point and the only red grapes that I have an even vaguely satisfying anecdotal set of evidence for, have shown 0% reduction, some very slow development (much less than has been predicted by the wineries and some NZ writers), and only one bottle with normally-paced development (but that was a wine I didn't have high hopes for in the first place). The current plan is to hold the rest longer.

I think, in general, some of these wines would have done better with a little more oxygen for advancement; I wonder if the things I'm waiting for won't be outpaced by generalized decay. On the other hand, none have been what anyone would consider the best examples of New Zealand pinot noir.
 
I recently spoke with an MS who went on a long trip via the Court to NZ.

He says that he tried fairly old vintages of several wines in screw cap and that the difference between those in cork and those were very evident. This was a big blinding with many different, older bottlings from multiple producers (I want to say he was hanging out with the Pegasus Bay and Fromm winemakers, who provided most of this old NZ stuff). He made it sound like it was stuff from the early 90s.

Predictably, he says that the aging process is dramatically retarded, but that he couldn't definitively say the wines suffered for their screw-capping (except for the pitfalls of reductiveness). He said that screwcap is a much better option if you want to keep stuff for a long time, but prize verve and freshness in your wine...it was sort of a weird thing to say. I mean, why not just drink the the young stuff?
 
Several things:

1) I think Fromm is still cork-only. Pegasus Bay has mostly transitioned, though I don't know if they've done it across all bottlings, but in any case they were slower than some to change the reds to screwcap. So they probably have differing views on what they were going to find or what points they were trying to make with those older bottles.

2) One of the biggest reasons for the wholesale transition to screwcap was the belief that Australia and New Zealand were getting substandard corks. I have no way to verify if this was the case or not, though it is very widely believed, but if it's true then the difference between cork and screwcap would be even more exacerbated than the technology would suggest.

3) There are a number of long-term studies that suggest similar aging profiles for screwcaps and fully-functioning corks. I think a study to limit the cork data set to just those corks might be welcome, if it doesn't exist.

4) There's no way to know if the wines I've opened would have been any more mature under an excellent cork. A lot of iffy clonal material and young vines are involved, and maybe the lack of development was all I could ever hope for.

I do agree that prizing freshness and wanting a screwcap for ultra-long aging seems like an odd contradiction, but it's possible he was using "fresh" in a more limited sense, as the opposite of "tired" rather than as a synonym for "primary." What I'd hope for them is a combination of slow aging, but definitely aging rather than holding, and consistency across bottles. I don't think there's much doubt about the latter anymore, but I guess we'll see about the former.
 
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