Tuesday, 18 February, 2020
The Ecologist, Nick Breeze
Ten years ago there seemed to be a huge shift away from corks and towards screw-caps. One reason for this is wine taint, or what many refer to as 'corked' wine, where a bacteria - Trichloroanisol - gives wine a damp cardboard aroma and destroys the wine's pleasurable characteristics.
Cork taint lost people money and also caused wine drinkers much disappointment. This paved the way for the rise of the aluminium screw-cap, which has been adopted on a huge scale in many of the world's leading regions.
In the period of the last decade, Portuguese company Amorim, the largest of the cork industry players, went to new lengths to detect the sources and eliminate cork taint. Today they use processes that clean the cork at various stages of the processing to reduce the risk. At the very top end, they have a technique known as ND Tech that guarantees the integrity of the cork.
Sustainability
However, it is fair to say that screw-caps have another ace up their sleeve - convenience. Not requiring extra tools like corkscrews obviously has benefits for those of us wishing to crack open a bottle of wine.
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