Cork or twist?

Just recently, this wasn't even a possible question in the world of wine. Let's admit it, we always (well at least I did) associated twist caps with cheap wines. A 'real' wine must have a cork on top. Right? So how come we see an increasing number of good bottles with twist caps in the stores?

A couple of weeks ago, producer Michel Laroche, based in Chablis, announced that all of his wines sold in Quebec at the SAQ will have the twist cap. And when he says 'all of them' he also means his prestigious Chablis Grand Cru Blanchot 'Réserve de l'Obédience'.

I heard that 5% of wines are 'corked' which means that they have this awful smell of wet cardboard. Honestly, I never encountered any corked wine... and I drank a lot of wine so far ;-)

Does that mean that the twist cap crimped inside a polyethylene joint is THE solution?

No, says Paul Kreider, the owner and winemaker of the Ross Valley Winery in San Anselmo, California. Kreider believes, in an article entitled Corks for wine, that this decision is purely economic.

It is too early to predict if the move to the twist cap will affect the aging of wine. Cork is a natural material that is equally permeable with the air and tight with the liquid. It thus allows an extremely slow exchange between the contents of the bottle and the ambient air. To these physical and mechanical qualities are added another advantage: it indicates when the wine got heat. In this case, the cork is pushed upwards and some wine can have even oozed outside (in this cas, choose another bottle).

This being said if the producers decide to go with the twist cap, we won't have any other choice than to follow. Unfortunately, if it is only a question of lowering production costs as Paul Kraider suggests and we discover that good wines can no longer age, that will be a real tragedy.

Only time will tell but in the meantime, the first side effect we will get is that we will loose this pleasure of smelling and touching the cork after opening a nice bottle ;-)