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Opinionista

All cork and no action

Michael Fridjhon is South Africa's most highly regarded international wine judge, the country's most widely consulted liquor industry authority, and one of South Africa's leading wine writers. Chairman of the Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show since its inception, he has judged in countless wine competitions around the world. Visiting Professor of Wine Business at the University of Cape Town, he has been an advisor to the Minister of Agriculture and is a recipient of the French Chevalier de l'Ordre du Mérite Agricole. Worldwide winner of the Louis Roederer International Wine Columnist of the Year award in 2012, he is the author, co-author or contributor to over 30 books and is a regular contributor to wine publications in the UK, France, Germany and China. He is the founder of winewizard.co.za , a site which specialises in scoring South Affrican wine and guiding consumers to excellent value for money and quality.

Over the past decade, the cork industry has cleaned up its act. Levels of taint are less now than they were at the turn of the millennium (when you could comfortably write off one bottle in every case on account of the corks). There are also new products on the market. However, reducing contamination only partially addresses the problem of using the bark of a tree to seal a bottle. So what’s the lowdown on the cork conundrum?

The world-wide sales of aluminium screw top wine closures have grown at least tenfold in the past decade and now total some five billion annually. Despite this, there are still some pockets of fundamentalist resistance. Those most attached to the idea of the veracity of ancient scripture (when it comes to cork versus screwcaps) are to be found in the United States, China, France, Italy, Spain – and, of course, South Africa. Though the Cape has seen a fairly extensive acceptance of screwcaps when it comes to white wines, especially for those where the fruit is most fragile (unwooded whites, most notably sauvignon blanc and riesling), surprisingly few premium reds come to market under this modern, effective and taint-free closure.

Producers like to pretend that they are constrained by consumer prejudice, though there are indications that their own lack of conviction plays a key role. In Australia – where the swing to screwcaps was driven by an industry-wide initiative – transformation was almost immediate and fairly complete. It requires a real effort to find cork-closed wines amongst Antipodean current releases. When you do come across the occasional example, it is generally a premium wine with strong export sales.

There can be no other industry in the world which relies on seriously outdated technology for the final component in its production process – and certainly none where a tried-and-tested modern alternative is available more cheaply and with a proven better performance. This says a great deal about the world of wine, its predilection for anachronism (at least in traditional production and consumption areas), its essential fundamentalism. Practising believers in Judeo-Christian societies like to ridicule radical Islam for the apparent irrationality with which it treats its scriptures as God-given truth. Generally their own attitude to the Bible is that it serves as a guide – but that it is also open to interpretation. For example, they disregard Old Testament injunctions about slave ownership, ritual stonings, and the retaliatory removal of eyes and teeth. They pride themselves on their willingness to distinguish between what may have been necessary to regulate society a few thousand years ago, and which approach is more appropriate in the modern world.

When it comes to wine, however, a blanket exemption seems to apply (and when it comes to wine closures, they are positively flat-earth in the application of their belief systems). This may be because most consumers appear to view winemaking as a kind of Amish home industry. I know producers in Burgundy who have long kept from sight their modern bottling and packaging lines. Visitors get the guided tour of the cob-webbed cellars, the ancient fermenters, the hand-crafted look and feel. Then, a bit like the 1950s sex education books which avoided the uncomfortable details (“mommy and daddy loved each other very much and then some time later you were born”) the visit ends without any explanation about how the wine gets from vat to bottle. When you ask why they maintain this very partial communication, you are told that its important to retain the romance (“it’s what wine drinkers want, after all.”)

I’m not sure that this is what South African consumers really prefer: yes, we like the idea of the unhurried pace of the wine farm lifestyle, we like to think of the winemaker as an artist rather than a scientist. We are not frightened off by stainless steel tanks and by mechanical sorting tables. We expect wineries to be spotlessly clean and we don’t believe that every bottle is filled by hand. In short, we accept that wine is made in a food factory and that the rules which govern its production should be as rigorous as for anything we expect to put into our mouths. So what is so special about the bark of the cork oak that it enjoys complete exemption from these criteria?

Probably not as much as some winemakers would like to believe. The assumption that wine-savvy consumers are wedded to cork may be no more than that. If they have wrapped their heads around screwcaps when it comes to white wines, then they are not immovable on the subject of closures. A concerted effort on the part of producers may be all it would take to achieve the necessary shift in perception. What stops them is inertia, fear of a precisely expressed negative reaction (versus the unquantified damage of cork taint, which even today ruins somewhere between 3% and 5% of all natural cork-closed wines), perhaps the costs of changes to bottling equipment to accommodate screwcaps. None of these are real impediments, except when there is a pre-disposition to do nothing.

Of course the cork producers are not taking this lying down. There has been substantial funding (some of it evidently from the EU) for a PR initiative to persuade journalists that the problems with cork are a thing of the past. South African wine writers have not been exempt from this charm offensive. (One is simultaneously a wine correspondent and the local Mac Maharaj for a major cork producer.) The one thing you can take for granted is that the bulk of pro-cork communication is written by the beneficiaries of this largesse. They are also often the writers who condemn screwcaps for faults which are clearly attributable to winemaking or bottling errors.

Too many winemakers have not factored the hermetic nature of these closures into their production methodology. More importantly, since most of them make use of the services of mobile bottlers, they often abdicate quality control to a third party contractor. When someone criticises their screwcap-closed wine for the pongy, eggy notes which occur as a result of mismanagement of this final stage of the production process, they blame the closure, rather than acknowledge their own dereliction of duty.

Over the past decade, the cork industry has cleaned up its act. Levels of taint are less now than they were at the turn of the millennium (when you could comfortably write off one bottle in every case on account of the corks). There are also new products on the market, of which the Diam agglomerate (not the unbranded lookalikes) is easily the best. However, reducing contamination only partially addresses the problem of using the bark of a tree to seal a bottle. It doesn’t dispose of random or sporadic bottle oxidation: no two corks are identical when it comes to how much oxygen they will admit over time, and there is no way of knowing which will promote gradual maturation, and which will lead to a premature decline (no matter how well the bottle has been stored).

Even if these twin risks were brought down to perceptible levels of around 2% (a consummation devoutly to be wished) that would still mean a significant and unnecessary loss, given that a perfectly good alternative exists. You wouldn’t book a flight on an airline with a 98% safety history – certainly not if there was another one with an untarnished track record offering the same schedules. The only reason the wine industry persists in using corks is that it is the punters who are paying for the producers’ poor judgement. That’s what happens when the people who book the flights are not the ones travelling on the planes. DM

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