---
title: "FAQ: do wines with screw caps age as well as wine with corks?"
description: Do wines with screw caps age as well as wine with corks? Discover what the difference between these two bottling methods means for a wine's complexity.
---

[Vincarta: blog articles for wine lovers and enthusiasts](https://vincarta.com/blog)

# [FAQ: do wines with screw caps age as well as wine with corks?](https://vincarta.com/blog/wines-screw-caps-age-wine-corks)

 Written by [Tom Wall](https://vincarta.com/blog/author/tom-wall) | 5 July 2017

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](https://www.cloudybay.co.nz/), 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_taint).

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.

<https://resources.vincarta.com/wine-tasting-for-beginners>

## **Tradition vs. innovation**

There is a lot of tradition in wine, and many winemakers<https://vincarta.com/blog/top-wine-specialists-twitter/>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](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19041929) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

<https://resources.vincarta.com/wine-tasting-for-beginners>

[View full post](https://vincarta.com/blog/wines-screw-caps-age-wine-corks)

```json
{
  "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "BlogPosting",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "name" : "Tom Wall"
  },
  "dateModified" : "2024-10-01T10:59:20.786Z",
  "datePublished" : "2017-07-05T16:00:58Z",
  "headline" : "FAQ: do wines with screw caps age as well as wine with corks?",
  "image" : {
    "@type" : "ImageObject",
    "height" : 2571,
    "url" : "https://info.vincarta.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/1920px-Wine_bottle_screwcap.jpg",
    "width" : 1920
  },
  "mainEntityOfPage" : "https://vincarta.com/blog/wines-screw-caps-age-wine-corks",
  "publisher" : {
    "@type" : "Organization",
    "logo" : {
      "@type" : "ImageObject",
      "height" : 60.0,
      "url" : "https://info.vincarta.com/hubfs/cropped-Vincarta-logo-with-trademark-470x110-1-1.png",
      "width" : 300.0
    },
    "name" : "Vincarta blog"
  }
}
```