Vintage Story
Epistemological epiphany:
Life must be lived forwards,
but can only be understood backwards
Mercifully, life may be enjoyed sideways!
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Full Moon: October 7, 2006. Allen Dale Olson a/k/a the Pontiff of Palate, Story Inn’s Wine Connoisseur. Copyright 2006 Story Bed & Breakfast, LLP, d/b/a Story Inn, all rights reserved. |
WINE UNCORKED
Last spring a friend handed me a bottle to open. We were standing in his candle-lit vestibule; I was not wearing my glasses, and I could not cut off the foil. I scraped and scraped, and finally tried to puncture the cork through the foil. I had just managed to scrape off a considerable piece of the foil when he returned to explain that the bottle had a screw cap, not a cork.
This was no bottle of plonk; it was a highly respected white wine from Spain. As more and more young people take over their family wineries, bringing with them the same savvy they have with the Internet and computers so spurned by their parents and grandparents, they are also bringing new technology, new grape blends, and, increasingly, new bottle stoppers.
Cork was an amazing technology in the early 17th century when grape farmers discovered that a little bit of bur oak bark could compress as it’s jammed into a bottle then expand as it snuggles in and thus help the wine with aging and transport. It still serves us reasonably well – but not without problems, including labor and availability.
Cork is shaved off the Quercus Suber evergreen, a slow-growing oak tree that flourishes along the Mediterranean Coast from Portugal to France. A tree must be at least 25 years old before the bark is worth harvesting, another nine to 20 years before the same tree can undergo another harvest. So one of the big problems is too little bark for all the wines produced today. Another is that they will dry out, though that’s less of a problem today when so few people really keep their bottles for a very long time.
Corks are home to wild life, notably a hole-boring weevil and a bacterium known simply as TCA, short for “cork taint” (trichloroanisole) which infects an estimated five to ten percent of all wines. They are also expensive.
Screw caps are neither expensive nor capable of drying out. Their metallic caps are coated with a protective wrap so they impart no disagreeable taste. They harbor no insects nor do they intimidate inexperienced waiters and waitresses.
But where is the romance? Think a waiter will hand you the cap after he’s removed it? Think he’ll learn to turn to the side while he smugly twists it off, making a loud pop with his mouth as he does so? No one knows. But we do know to expect more and more screw caps on our wine bottles.
Forty percent of all Australian wines are now capped, and almost 90% of New Zealand wines. Even the French and Californians are getting into the act. In fact, most screw caps for wine bottles are now manufactured in France.
Critics still demand to know if the wines will age properly thus stoppered. Proponents say it doesn’t matter and ask who keeps wines long enough to find out. Let’s just hope they don’t start wrapping wines in plain, brown sacks.
Vintage Story is an e-newsletter authored by Ole Olson and published by the Story Inn, and is available free of charge to all who appreciate good wine. Vintage Story is published at each full moon. The author and the Story Inn specifically authorize the republication, reprinting and circulation of any issue Vintage Story so long as due credit is given to the author and to the Story Inn (which holds the copyright).
If any newspaper or website desires to make use of any issue of Vintage Story, we do request that you notify us. Thanks, and here's to your health!
