The Wine Knows - corks/closures

Taming of the screw

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:32:09 -0400

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.

No cork like 'real' cork, I suppose

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:21:58 -0400

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.

Pulling a cork with confidence

Tue, 27 May 2008 02:21:45 -0400

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.

Lack of corked wines in Riesling judging

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:03:06 -0400

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.

Rieslings and the state of alternative closures

Sat, 10 May 2008 11:24:29 -0400

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.

Leonetti tests alternative closure

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:38:30 -0400

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.

Multi-front battle for top of wine bottles

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:04:44 -0400

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."

Woodinville winery switches to glass 'corks'

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:48:21 -0500

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.

Experience with the twist

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:59:49 -0500

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.

What I'm reading

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:59:20 -0500

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.

Corks care not about the wines beneath them

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 14:19:03 -0500

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.

Denial, a river of untruth

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:42:32 -0500

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").

In defense of corks

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:37:54 -0500

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.

Thoughts on judging Pinot Noir

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 21:07:27 -0500

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.

Wax attacks

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:24:00 -0500

On Saturday, I spent 10 frustrating minutes getting the wax off the top of a bottle of olive oil. I was unable to use my usual trick for handling wax-dipped bottles because this bottle had a T-top instead of a regular cork.

I don't particularly care for bottles (wine, olive oil or otherwise) that have wax-dipped tops. Wineries do this with their better wines as a way to give them a classy look and to make them feel more expensive. The result is a bottle that is difficult to open.