Screw cap wines uncork tradition

 Wine drinkers may be turning up their noses at the concept of screw caps but vintners are laughing all the way to the bank.

Ironically, those in the industry say it’s not the wine snobs who are shunning the screw caps closures. People who are knowledgeable and drink a fair amount of wine know about screw cap closures and are of accepting of it. The obstacle is that screw caps defy tradition and people love the “pulling the cork” ritual. It has been equated with fine wines and hundreds of years and it’s hard to give up traditions.

More and more vintners are discovering using screw cap closures is a quality issue because they believe it protects the integrity of the fruit from cork taint.

In fact, 5 percent of all bottles of wine is affected by bad corks. A musty, wet cardboard aroma is a sign of cork taint and is because it masks the aromas of the fruit.

The culprit is trichloroanisole, a complex chemical that results from the reaction with natural molds and chlorine bleach within corks. Many winemakers turned to synthetic corks with not much success. They were hard to pull and harder to get back into the neck of the bottle. Even good corkscrews have problems with punching through the denser plastics.

A wine expert at an upscale wine and spirits store in Menlo Park said the business is beginning to carry more screw cap wines in the $8- $20 range but there is some resistance.

He said the lighter wines like Sauvignon blanc do better in the screw caps but if he wants to store some personal wine for years he prefers a cork in the bottle. In addition, more and more vintners are using lasers to check the veracity of the closure against cork taint.

Don Sebastiani & Sons, a heavy hitter in Napa Valley winemaking, puts out a screw cap named appropriately Screw Kappa Napa. The reasonably priced varietals include Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sauvignon blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot noir.

I had dinner at a lovely French restaurant last night and ordered a Ferrari Carano Fume blanc. I admit I was surprised when the waiter unscrewed the bottle and offered me a sniff. The wine was lively and full of citrus and paired beautifully with the delicate calamari but I’ll admit I missed the sound and anticipation of the cork leaving the bottle.