The Wine Knows

Two years ago, Leonetti owner Gary Figgins judged the Northwest Wine Summit on Oregon's Mount Hood. I'd recently seen my first glass "cork" from Alcoa in a bottle of Sinnean. Over dinner, my buddy Hank Sauer and I showed the cork alternative to Gary. He was fascinated and wondered if he might be able to talk his son, winemaker Chris Figgins, into testing the closure.

It seems Gary made a convincing argument, as Leonetti is running an in-house test of the Vino-Lok. Chris has about five cases of Leonetti wine under glass closures and plans to see how the wines compare over multiple years.

The Vino-Lok is a classy-looking closure and would work well for Leonetti, just as it has for many other Northwest wineries, including Sineann, Solena, Northwest Totem Cellars and Syncline.

In recent years, Ken Wright of Ken Wright Cellars in Carlton, Ore., has abandoned natural corks in favor of Nomacorc, a foam-filled synthetic cork that looks similar to a natural cork. Wright has had no problems with the closure on his high-end Pinot Noirs.