TN: Dinner at Racines NY with Kelley Fox (April 13, 2016)

[MLipton]

Oh, but it is, O. Taste is fluid and subject to outside influences. Another example: look how the Western ideal of female beauty has morphed over the centuries, from Rubensesque to flappers to Betty Page to Twiggy.

Mark Lipton

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

Taste is undoubtedly fluid, I would never dispute that. The issue here for me is altogether different. Regardless of whether you prefer no ingress or minimal ingress, a screwcap can give it to you with more stability than any cork. But if you are arguing for the romance of unpredictability, every bottle a crap shoot, then you can certainly plead aesthetics (of a sort).

 

[kirk wallace]

I wonder if there is a business opportunity for someone to set up an after-market screw cap service? Bring in your bottles under cork and, to the extent they aren't already corked or otherwise bad (see, e.g., other threads on heat damage, Ox, P'ox, etc.), come out with screw caps instead, all done under some sort of neutral gas and pressure environment? maybe this could only work if you had a few trucks with the equipment and traveled major market regions. how much would people pay per bottle? The initial capital cost of the equipment would seem steep. This would have the side-effect "advantage" of purging your cellar of corked and OTH bottles.

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

Interesting, but would have to devise a way to manage without the circular threading (etched in the glass) that is needed for the screw cap to fit.

With regular bottle endings, perhaps a crown cap would serve this idea better (assuming they are as good as screw caps).

The place where the cork used to be would now be filled with air, so there would be more air in the bottle than anticipated. So the inert gas would probably be a must.

 

[Keith Levenberg]

originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:

originally posted by MLipton:
The love for cork's inability to exclude oxygen is akin to those partisans who maintained a preference for the "warmth" of tube amps after solid state amps made their appearance. Likewise, there are still fans of Retsina, expressing a taste preference that likely dates to the era when amphorae were sealed with pitch.

'Twas ever thus,
Mr. Natural Mark Lipton

Then how contradictory of me, since I far prefer tube amps and hate retsina. Or perhaps the comparison is not quite pertinent.

Perfectly pertinent! Those who prefer the "warmth" of tubes and analog can always use the equalizer dials and compression tools to distort a clean signal in the same manner.

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:

originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:

originally posted by MLipton:
The love for cork's inability to exclude oxygen is akin to those partisans who maintained a preference for the "warmth" of tube amps after solid state amps made their appearance. Likewise, there are still fans of Retsina, expressing a taste preference that likely dates to the era when amphorae were sealed with pitch.

'Twas ever thus,
Mr. Natural Mark Lipton

Then how contradictory of me, since I far prefer tube amps and hate retsina. Or perhaps the comparison is not quite pertinent.

Perfectly pertinent! Those who prefer the "warmth" of tubes and analog can always use the equalizer dials and compression tools to distort a clean signal in the same manner.

As I said, my point in favor of screw caps has nothing to do with esthetics (though, as someone who was a professional electric guitarist for years, I disagree about the possibility of satisfactorily imitating tube amp distortion using transistor amps and tools).

 

[MLipton]

Far from arguing against screw caps, O., I am an avid proponent. My observation was simply to draw the analogy I see to those who doggedly prefer an older technology for esthetic reasons rooted in their conditioned preference.

Mark Lipton

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

Gotcha, sorry to not have understood the esthetic tangent.

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

Last night we opened a 2014 Mirabai and it was positively a positive experience.

I thought it was going to be somewhat closed, but it wasn't.

The cherry fruitiness was cheery, there was a agreeable touch of CO2 at the front-end and a back slappin' saltiness at the back-end, with some iodine and stems in-betwixt.

It was quite sweet, but gladhanding rather than cloying.

Marcia thought it was slightly modern due to a hint of overripeness and a slight lack of acidity, neither of which I sensed (even though 13.5% is pushing it for me).

No hint of wood or extraction to spoil the party.

Overall, an attractive youngster, that should age gracefully under that bug-free screwcap as it loses those cherubic fat folds.