Closures that improve the wine

The growth in alternative closures has led to a new understanding of the way wine evolves and the particular role that oxygen plays. But the findings have added a new layer of complexity to wine making. It's taken time, money and international expertise to unravel  the mysteries and simplifying the answers.
 
 
There’s nothing romantic about the Nomacorc facility at Zebulon in North Carolina. Instead of chateaux and picturesque vineyards, the landscape dotted with boxy offices. Instead of charm, there’s a gleaming factory. The ethos is unashamedly corporate, with wall charts describing corporate goals, and notice boards encouraging employees to come up with new efficiencies.

But this is the home of a wine industry revolution. Although Nomacorc looks like they’re selling wine closures -  pieces of extruded foam, shaped by patented technology to make them look like natural corks – the real core of their business is oxygen. While winemakers have always understood that oxygen played an important role in wine development, it was Nomacorc’s work that revealed just how important oxygen is throughout the winemaking process. Their research revealed so much, in fact, that it’s become clear that something new would be required: a way to simplify the research and give winemakers a practical tool to use it.

The closures race
It was one too many dud bottles of wine that was the impetus for Nomacorc. A Belgian businessman, Gert Noel, decided to invent a new wine closure after too many cork-tainted bottles appeared at a family party. He already understood plastic, as his company was a supplier of products like pipe insulation and pool noodles. But plastic stoppers, it turned out, made poor wine bottle closures, not least because they were hard to get out of the bottle. In 1993, Gert and his son Marc created ‘Project Broomstick’ to research the problem. Six years later, they had a solution: a strong inner core surrounded by a softer material. Not only was it easy to remove from the bottle, it could be made to look like natural cork – something that competitors hadn’t understood was necessary, causing them to churn out multi-coloured stoppers that consumers didn’t like.

The Zebulon facility, established in 1999, is all about an attention to detail and hygiene, with foam moving smoothly through pipes, water and cutting machines, before being stamped with the logo of the end user. While the process looks simple enough, going from beads of foam through to final finished product, the technology involved has resulted in more than 30 patents.

Nomacorc’s timing couldn’t have been better. The 1990s saw growing dismay about cork taint, and new companies such as Supreme Corq and Neocork were already making headway in the alternative closures market. Around the turn of the century, Australia and New Zealand began to adopt the screw cap in earnest. The efforts of the alternative closure industry were also given an unintentional boost by the cork industry, which exasperated producers by refusing to deal with cork taint. By the time the cork industry woke up to the challenge it was facing, influential retailers in the key British market had begun to accept alternatives.