The Wine Knows

Chateau Ste. Michelle continues to dip its toes into the screwcap waters.

The state's flagship winery put about 12,000 cases of its 2006 Columbia Valley Riesling under threads, primarily for the export market. Now, with the 2007 Columbia Valley Riesling, it has eschewed corks for 13,000 cases.

Braiden Rex-Johnson has an article in Pacific Northwest magazine about boxed wines, in which she reviews some of the better ones and the thought processes behind using this alternative to bottles and corks.

CorkTec, a Connecticut-based cork producer, is setting up shop in the heart of Washington's Columbia Valley. Read our story on it here.

By fall, CorkTec plans to be producing up to 2 million corks per month with the idea of taking advantage of the fast-growing Northwest wine industry.

My "friend" in the cork industry is back. I figured he might send me email today because I wrote something positive about a cork product (see "Pulling a cork with confidence").

Nope, he still isn't happy.

Anyone who has spent much time with me knows I'm not the type to become particularly stressed out. In fact, one might describe me as easy going, perhaps even laid back.

Yet pulling the cork on a bottle of wine tends to cause my blood pressure to rise because I simply do not know whether the wine beneath will be tainted or all right.

Today, I opened two bottles of wine - and I enjoyed a soothing level of confidence in both.

During our judging Saturday of 116 Pacific Northwest Rieslings, we had just one corked wine. In fact, the far bigger problem was oxidation.

One might see this as a good trend that we found just one wine infected with TCA, the compound that makes a wine smell like a wet dog sleeping on rotting cardboard in a musty basement.

Going into our big Riesling judging today, I figured we would be able to get a sense of where the Pacific Northwest stands in alternative closures. With Riesling being a white wine that generally will be drunk in its youth, there would be a greater likelihood of alternatives such as screwcaps and synthetics.

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's interesting to see the multi-front approach being taken by Supreme Corq. A recent study the Kent, Wash., company released shows its "X2" closure is retaining more free S02 than "tree bark" closures over a two-year study period.

On the other side of the battle, the study reveals that wines taste just as good after two years as those in screwcaps "without the time, expense and reduction risk of moving to screwcaps."

Northwest Totem Cellar in Woodinville, Wash., has switched all of its red wine closures to the glass Vino-Seal. A handful of Northwest wineries, including Sineann, Syncline, Solena and Barking Frog, have begun to use the Alcoa product, an elegant alternative to corks and screwcaps.