Video Transcript: A Quick Guide to Wine Enclosures
Written By: Anonymous on Tue, Sep 30th 2008
Brian Freedman: Welcome to classicwines.com. Today, we will be talking about bottle closures. Now, this is used to be very, very simple, you had one of these things; you had a cork. These have worked for a very long time indeed. The problem is they have come in for some criticism lately. Depending on whose statistics you listen to, there might be issue with TCA contamination, there might be issues with the quality of the cork; maybe depending upon who you ask certainly not the Portuguese cork industry, possibly there is a shortage of cork. I am not weighing in on it; I am just reporting the facts here or at least, the opinions that people are putting forth. Great thing about cork, they worked for a long time. Honestly, they are reasonably reliable. I have never opened up a first-growth bottle of Bordeaux and not seen a cork. For these, for the high-end ones, I will not be surprised to keep on seeing those.
Downside of those, you have to store the bottle of wine on its side. Otherwise, cork can dry out, contracts, lets oxygen or oxygen, both work. Either way, it results in wine that frankly becomes vinegar.
Now, you also have these, these are synthetic corks. Synthetic corks, I mean they are descent alternative. The only problem or one of the only problems is that they are difficult to wedge out of the bottle sometimes. Even with the good corkscrew like this, sometimes you really have to put a little more elbow grease into that process of pulling it out of the neck of the bottle than maybe you want to or even the process frankly needs.
Another technology you might be seeing; this is essentially a glass plug, pop it right off. The underside you can see here, it has a bit of an 'O' ring on it and this keeps a perfectly solid seal. These really haven't caught on that much on this side of the pond. I wouldn't be surprised if you do start seeing more of them in coming years. I also wouldn't be surprised if you don't. Jury is still out.
So, a lot of times the screw-top wines tend to get a little bit of a bad reputation. So, let's actually give this one a try to see if all that bad talk about those things are real. Popping our soirée in bottle decanter here, just to give it a little bit oxygen and give this guy a swirl here, sniff. Smell is as good as any wine sealed with a cork. We have to drink it through authenticity. Beautiful bottle, it didn't suffer one bit by being closed with a Stelvin.
Well, we would like to thank the Wine School of Philadelphia for all their help with education. We would like to thank you for joining us. We would also like to thank Big House Red for providing me an early day glass of red. From all of us here at classicwines.com, thanks for joining us. Cheers!
