The Wine Knows

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.

It is doubtful anyone in the Pacific Northwest has more experience working with screwcaps than Co Dinn and his fellow winemakers at Hogue Cellars in Prosser, Wash. They're into their third year of bottling 75 percent of their 600,000 cases of wines under threads.

I'm most of the way through George Taber's To Cork or Not to Cork, a book that looks at the history of using corks as wine bottle closures.

On Friday, the Wine Press Northwest crew was working through its weekly double-blind tasting of 32 wines. In the third flight, the judges came across a wine that was badly corked. It is said that TCA can be detected at levels as low as six parts per trillion. If that's so, then this one must have been 10 times that level.

My "friend" in the cork industry is back - and he doesn't like what I'm writing. My latest note about the high incidence of cork taint in our recent Pinot Noir judging prompted him to email me.

First, he doesn't think I'm fair to corks (he apparently didn't read my missive the other day, "In defense of corks").

You might have noticed that I'm no fan of cork taint and am more than happy to point out the volatility of protecting winemakers' hard work with a piece of tree bark.

Just last week, I wrote a screed about how we had a nearly 6 percent rate of cork taint during a Pinot Noir judging we conducted. This item surprised fellow wine scribe Mike Dunne of the Sacramento Bee, who said he's noticed a significant drop in tainted wines so far this year.

Today, we concluded our judging of Pinot Noirs. We tasted through 133 Pinots from Oregon, Washington and Idaho. We plan to do a separate tasting of B.C. Pinots in the Okanagan, as it is nearly impossible to get samples across the border anymore.