| Screwed
for Good? Screw Caps and Red Wine
By Tyson Stelzer – August 2007
www.winereviewonline.com
I'm about to give you two glasses of the same wine, one
from a cork-sealed bottle and the other from a screw-capped bottle.
Can you tell me which is which?
It's a question I faced last month when I visited Felton Road
winery in Central Otago, New Zealand. I didn't know it at the
time, but I was about to experience one of the most profound wine
comparisons I have ever encountered.
I wish I could take you back there with me, but for now you'll
just have to accept me handing you the two glasses in cyberspace
and asking you to decide which is which from my notes.
The wine was the Felton Road 2001 Chardonnay. The glass on the
left was a brownish yellow colour, while the wine on the right
had a light yellow tint. A quick check of the nose revealed that
the wine on the left was corked, and it was quickly whisked away
and replaced with another glass. The replacement was the same
colour as the first, with a slightly flat bouquet and a palate
showing spicy melon flavours. It was clearly oxidised and would,
no doubt, have been a better wine some years earlier. The wine
on the right was full of life, with integrated peach and grapefruit
flavours which lingered on a long finish, supported by fine, minerally
acidity.
How did you do? Cork-sealed wine on the left; screw cap on the
right? No prizes for getting this far!
Now let's make it harder. 2001 Felton Road Pinot Noir. Same question.
This time the colour told me nothing--they were identical.
Left: Spicy, lifted and dusty on the bouquet. The palate displayed
attractive red berry fruit, great length, fresh acidity and well-defined,
slightly angular tannins.
Right: Slightly muted at first, and the finish was a little
short. It hadn't been decanted, but after a few minutes of swirling
in the glass, attractive spice and red berry fruits blossomed
and the finish filled out to even greater length than the wine
on the left. Fresh acid again, but the real difference lay in
the structure. Here the tannins were finer, more integrated, softer
and more rounded.
Which is which? My guess was that more integrated tannins pointed
to a cork seal. I got it wrong.
The question of the ageing of red wine under screw caps has been
hotly debated for years. But it's about to take on a whole new
perspective, because for the first time in history we now have
commercially significant quantities of premium red wines with
sufficient bottle age to show some development. The opportunity
to taste these wines is now available to everyone. In the past,
such wines have been limited to very rare tastings. Now they're
going public.
Screw caps have been on trial since 1961, and in commercial
use for wine since 1972. The first formal trial was conducted
in Australia during the 1970s under the direction of Dr. Bryce
Rankine. The trial involved some 3000 bottles, red and white,
three different screw caps, corks, and countless tastings by trained
panels over seven years. By the end of it all, Rankine concluded
that this trial confirmed "unequivocally," that, 'the
range of wines examined retained their quality with a Stelvin
closure significantly better than with a cork.' Reds and whites.
This announcement was made almost thirty years ago, but it has
only been in recent times that we have seen evidence of the ability
of wines to age under screw cap for extremely long periods of
time, thanks to bottles which remain from those original trials
of the 1960s and 1970s. It is in this area, more than any other,
that the screw cap offers an advantage which cannot be replicated
by any other alternative closure which has--or will be--developed.
Winemakers can have confidence in the ability of the screw cap
to sustain a wine long-term because we now have forty-five years
of evidence to demonstrate it.
In 2005, Burgundian négociant Jean-Claude Boisset announced
its move to screw caps in these words: "The tasting which
triggered this off was that of a distinguished Mercurey 1966 closed
by a screw cap, presented by a dignitary of the Chair of Oenology
at the Université de Bourgogne…. It turned out that
the wine had an absolutely fantastic freshness, great body, and
was in superb condition."
The wine was tasted in the spring of 2004, at all of thirty-eight
years of age. It emerged from the early screw cap tests conducted
at the University of Burgundy, among the first of their kind in
France. An even older remnant of these trials, a 1964 Nuits St
Georges Premier Cru Burgundy, was opened at a recent tasting and,
in the words of Professor Feuillat in the French journal Revue
des Oenologues, it "astonished participants by its remarkable
state."
That's all very well for Pinot Noir, but what about big reds
with firm tannins that need to be tamed? In 2005 I had opportunity
to present a series of seminars for the wine trade in Japan. One
of these involved a comparative tasting of wines under cork and
screw cap. The highlight was a bottle of 1996 Penfolds Bin 389
Cabernet Shiraz which had been bottled for a study investigating
the role of oxygen in the ageing of wine. Under screw cap, the
wine was a delight, but the contrast under cork was dramatic.
The first cork-sealed bottle showed flavors and aromas of cork
wood. The second had a dusty character and its fruit was flat
and lifeless. Neither showed the fruit definition or the balanced,
aged complexity of the screw-capped bottle, which had developed
exactly as one would hope for a full-bodied red almost a decade
into its life.
Comparisons such as these, and many others like them, confirm
that wines can certainly age magnificently under screw cap. And
yet it's also apparent that they do not age in exactly the same
way that they do under cork. Peter Godden of the Australian Wine
Research Institute (AWRI) said recently, "in virtually every
case, this is a positive and not a negative thing." He emphasised
that the notion that "optimal" ageing is defined by
the way in which wine ages under cork is now redundant. Cork is
not a reliable reference point and should no longer be regarded
as the benchmark for ageing comparisons. He stressed that in his
closure trials, whenever wines were bottled under different closures,
they were changed so radically that they could effectively be
thought of as different wines. They aged not only at different
rates but in different ways.
The question of the ageing rate of wines in screw cap has been
a hot topic of late. It is my belief that the rate at which mature
notes (or "characters," as we say Down Under) develop
in screw-capped wines is in fact absolutely no different to that
under traditional closures. This is evidenced by the fact that
wines under screw cap age at a similar rate to those with the
very best corks. For a wine under an average cork, however, oxidation
effects give the impression of accelerated ageing, which has led
to the notion that wines mature slower under screw caps. I believe
that the absence of oxidized characters in screw-capped wines
gives the mistaken impression of slower ageing.
And this is exactly why I thought the Felton Road Pinot Noir
with more integrated, less aggressive tannins, was the cork-sealed
wine. If you ever doubted that red wine tannins could develop
and mature under screw cap, seek out this wine. It is proof in
a bottle that red wines can not only age well under screw cap,
but better than they can under cork.
And not just this wine. Earlier in the same week that I tasted
it, the same exercise had been conducted with a much larger selection
of red and white wines from the 2001 and 2002 vintages in Central
Otago. The result? Across the group of winemakers present, the
screw-capped wines were preferred over the cork-sealed wines.
In every single case.
We can argue about oxygen and wine ageing. We can debate about
different methods of measuring oxygen that passes through corks
compared with that through screw caps. We can go on about random
oxidation, flavour "scalping," cellaring conditions,
whatever. But, at the end of the day, when the scientists put
away their meters and notebooks and we are left with two glasses
on the table in front of us, showcasing the same wine from bottles
with different seals, there is only one question that matters.
Which wine is better?
It's a comparison that I encourage you to make at every available
opportunity. Buy every wine you can find under different closures.
Taste them young, taste them old, play "options" games
to trick your friends, compare the wines, and decide for yourself.
And while you're at it, keep an eye out for reductive characters.
Hydrogen sulphide is a natural by-product of fermentation, but
it can show itself in a wine in a variety of objectionable ways,
in aromas and flavours that range from struck flint and burnt
matches to rubber, cabbage and rotten eggs. These are described
as "reductive" or "reduced," and in sufficient
concentration they can overwhelm any wine.
More criticism has been levelled at screw caps by the media in
relation to reductive characters than any other fault. I encourage
you to view these accusations objectively and judge for yourself.
If there is a causal link between screw caps and reductive characters,
as some claim, then we should be tasting more reductive wines
under screw cap than under cork.
Check it out for yourself, but my experience, and that of hundreds
of experts with whom I have had this conversation, is quite the
opposite. In my own tastings in recent years, comprising thousands
of predominantly Australian and New Zealand wines, I have encountered
more reductive wines under cork than I have under screw cap.
The managing director of the AWRI, Professor Sakkie Pretorius,
commented recently that "The idea that there is a high incidence
of post-bottling reduction in wines sealed with screw caps is
a false premise. With Australian wines, where the AWRI has particular
expertise, this is demonstrably not the case…. Our position,
which we believe is undeniable, remains that the propensity of
a wine to develop 'reductive' aromas post-bottling is a function
of the wine, and that post-bottling reduction is not the 'fault'
of the closure but may be exacerbated by the closure if the wine
has a propensity for such aromas to develop."
"In his Screw Cap Symposium presentation, Peter Godden discussed
data from one of our AWRI Advanced Wine Assessment Courses which
indicates a higher incidence of reduction in wines sealed with
cork compared to wines sealed with screw caps. Two subsequent
courses have provided similar data."
A lot has been written about screw caps as wine closures in recent
years, but if you're not up to speed on the debate, all you really
need to do is get out there and taste the wines (and this is always
the most fun way to learn as well!). With a bit of practice, you
might just do a better job than I did in picking which Felton
Road Pinot was which. Best of luck!
Tyson Stelzer has been named the world's most prolific writer
on the topic of screw caps by The Oxford Companion to Wine. The
Australian writer is the author of 'Taming the Screw: A Manual
for Winemaking with Screw Caps' and five other wine books. He
is a contributor to the closure entries in the third edition of
The Oxford Companion to Wine and has presented seminars on the
subject in five countries. Tyson was a finalist for the 2006 International
Wine and Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year. His books
are available from www.winepress.com.au
|
Why
are they called STELVIN?