It's extremely rare to find wine mentioned in the editorial columns of a national newspaper. Wine occasionally makes it onto the news pages if England's winemakers have had a fantastic vintage (or say they have), a terrible natural disaster befalls the vineyards of France, or a winemaker attacks his neighbour with a blunt corkscrew, but for the most part wine is relegated to the lifestyle sections. Quite right, too. In the grander scheme of things, wine isn't terribly newsworthy.
So why did leader writers on at least two newspapers turn their attention to wine recently? The answer was the humble screw cap which, according to the Guardian, has 'failed to catch on' with UK consumers. The editorial was prompted by some research carried out by Wine Intelligence, which spoke to 1,150 punters to get their views on screw caps and concluded that 'wine bottles should still be sealed with a real cork, despite the supposed benefits of screw caps and plastic cork substitutes'.
At first sight, the findings seem to support the Wine Intelligence line - a line, it must be said, that has gone down well with cork suppliers in Portugal and Spain. Ninety-nine per cent of respondents said they were 'positive or neutral' about cork, while 60 per cent of them actively didn't like wines sealed with a screw cap.
To me, the more significant fact is that 40 per cent were positive or neutral about the closure. Given the history of screw caps and their negative associations as far as wine (if not necessarily whisky) drinkers are concerned, I'd say there's been a remarkable turnaround. One piece of research that went largely unreported was that a third of respondents had changed their minds about screw caps in the last year and formed a more positive impression.
Wine hacks were implicitly criticised by Wine Intelligence for leading punters by the nose. 'The pro-cork consumer attitude flies in the face of recent press coverage highlighting the benefits of screw caps,' it said. Well, yes and no, your honour. My belief is that the more people are aware of the problem of cork taint, or TCA, in wine, the more likely they are to welcome screw caps. TCA affects around five per cent of all bottles sealed with a natural cork, rendering them less enjoyable (at best) or undrinkable (at worst).
I understand why some people think screw caps are naff. I was once in a branch of KwikSave when the bloke behind me in the queue took the cap off a one-litre bottle of Lambrusco and started swigging it. But unless the cork industry can do something to eradicate cork taint (and they are certainly trying), I'm going to continue to plug screw caps. I'm not convinced that they are the best closure for age-worthy red wines but, for everything else, especially aromatic white wines, they are a much better bet than natural cork. We should all be grateful to Tesco and the New Zealand wine industry in particular for having the courage to lead the way.
Screw caps may not provide the distinctive 'pop' of a natural wine cork, but I couldn't care less. I opened a bottle of 1997 Chteau Pichon-Baron, Pauillac last week and the bottle was horrendously corked. I called the merchant I'd bought it from and asked if they could refund my £39.99. 'Er, sorry sir,' said a salesman on the other end of the line, 'but I'm afraid we can't send the bottles back to Bordeaux. The château always claims that the wine was in perfect condition when it left them.' Faced with such arrogance is it any wonder that savvy consumers are switching to screw caps?
