While screw caps still have a bit of a bad reputation, in our opinion, it’s undeserved. But do bottles with this type of closure age as well as wine with corks?
Screw caps and everyday wine
Imagine you’ve bought a bottle of wine and maybe you’ve kept it for a few years. What do you care about? Probably the topmost question in your mind is ‘Does it still taste good?’
In all probability, a screw cap bottle will keep its freshness just as well as a cork bottle. Perhaps better.
Indeed, that’s why many Australian and New Zealand producers, even high-quality producers like Cloudy Bay, use screw-caps.
They reckon it preserves the freshness of the fruit and it avoids the risk of cork taint from a faulty cork. Although this is less common than it was, it still affects around one bottle in 100.
In the past, screw-caps were sometimes too airtight and this resulted in reductive aromas from newly opened bottles. But newer screw-cap designs allow some oxygen transfer, avoiding this problem.
Tradition vs. innovation
There is a lot of tradition in wine, and many winemakers aim to emulate the classics, especially if they want to charge a premium price. This includes choosing corks over screwcaps.
Certainly, for Vincarta, we ended up with a selection that was all cork-sealed. Not out of prejudice, but because we wanted a high-quality selection and all our producers have all gone down the cork route.
Screw-caps and age-worthy classic wines
Whether there’s a difference in quality, in the long run, is harder to say. I believe that for wines that you might keep 5–10 years, a screw cap probably won’t be any worse and might be better than a cork. Beyond that, the jury is still out because of the small sample of properly old screw-cap bottles.
Undoubtedly, the great French houses have libraries of test wine in their cellars with screw caps to see how they age over the years. But nobody has opened a 50-year-old Burgundy or Bordeaux with a screw cap to see how it’s aged because, well, there aren’t any. Yet.
How to open a bottle with a screw cap
You can open them the normal way but check out this video for a more entertaining approach.
Image: Screw cap capsule ready to put on a bottle of wine. Source: Agne27 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
