Alternative Wine Closures

Hi Art I've cut & pasted below a post I made a couple of weeks ago regarding a stelvins perfect seal. All I could say about the y'Quem & Huet is that they would be different if they were sealed in stelvin, not better or worse necesarily, just different. One thing I have learned in 25 years of wine is that every bottle I drink is completely individual, the experience I have with a 27 y'Quem WILL be different to the experience you have. This is the glory of wine. Cheers Andrew

Whilst there are more & more wines going into Stelvin it can be hard to find older ones, it does happen though. In late 2002 I went to Brown Brothers winery in the King Valley Central Victoria where a friend of mine had taken a position as Food & Beverage Manager (Restaurant & Cellar Door) I'd been there before and enjoyed their fairly extensive range, this time however I had the good fortune & right connections to sample a bottle of 1977 Spatlese Lexia that had been sealed under Stelvin and stored in the Family Cellar. (3 dozen of every wine, every vintage goes into the family cellar and it is a very impressive sight) We tasted the '77 alongside the '02, these wines were made in exactly the same way from pretty much the same parcel of grapes. Well what an unbeleivable difference, the '02 was overly sweet, one dimensional trailer trash wine. The '77, with no addition but old father time and a perfect seal, was rich & complex, honeyed mint and toasty caramel with a magnificent lingering finish and wonderful fresh vibrancy. This was a "Stelvin Epiphany" for me, far from being a cheap seal for cheap wine it suddenly became by far the best seal for all those semillons & reislings I love with 5 to 10 years or more on them. I buy a couple of dozen premium Oz reisling every year ($20 -$30) for ageing and I now look exclusively for Stelvins. Love that closure. Andrew

I'[d say 5+% is about my average too, except for Jan 2005! So far I've had badly corked bottles of '98 Fontenil, '93 Chiarlo Barolo, '95 Ridge Geyserville, Brundlmayer GruVe, & '99 Cline Zin, plus bottles of '96 Potensac and '01 Selbach-Oster Kab that I sniffed a lot before deciding they were definitely corked. Probably closer to 15%. Bring on the stelvins.

Perhaps you should drink less :-)

Art, they would have aged better - and equally, i.e. without bottle variation.

Btw, the idea of corks letting "breathe" the wine to age is an urban legend. Please read Tyson Stelzer's opening post of this thread about the most recent findings of oxigen transgressability of corks vs. stelvins, done by the AWRI:

or

Thank you.

M.

Michael Pronay wrote:

Michael, While we agree on most issues vinous, I'm afraid that we'll have to agree to disagree over this one. The data you cite merely show that corks permit, on average, far more oxygen ingress than do Stelvin closures and that there is far more variability even among the best corks than there is among Stelvin. However, does this really mean that the aging of wine is anaerobic? If we take the mean value for cork cited, 0.012 mL/day of oxygen, that's actually quite a bit of oxygen getting into the bottle. Mark Squires's argument that bottles with the least ullage show the best is a good point, but keep in mind that the data presented were for three year old corks. I would hazard a guess that the degree of oxygen permability by corks hardly remains constant with time. My views on this matter also arise from the chemistry of wine aging. The processes I have seen for the polymerization of tannin (leading to sediment formation) all involve oxygen, either directly or indirectly. The UC Davis people cite an "anaerobic" process that uses acetaldehyde to cross-link tannins... but where does the acetaldehyde come from? I say it comes from the (oxygen-mediated) dehydrogenation of alcohol, and I have seen no suggestions to the contrary. So I will remain a skeptic. I know of your citations of hermetically sealed bottles aging gracefully, but I remain unconvinced that they age in precisely the same way as in bottles sealed under less than ideal conditions. I feel that the true test will come from studies in which the same wine, bottled under Stelvin and cork is tasted over a

30-50 year period and evaluated under double-blind conditions. Only then will we have a true test for how well wines develop under Stelvin. However, I am 100% behind the use of Stelvin and hope that such studies, by the AWRI and others, are carried out soon so that we can settle this issue once and for all.

Mark Lipton

Mark Lipton

We're not *that* far apart, after all ... ;-)

M.

Salut/Hi Michael Pronay,

le/on 1 Feb 2005 04:40:23 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

I don't think there's enough good evidence on this, Michael for you to be so categorical. I'm sorry, but you shouldn't let your support for Stelvin (with which I agree) blind you to the fact that it is entirely normal for there to be an interchange through/past the cork. I agree entirely with Mark on this. The problem, as you know only too well, is that with wines which are aging up to 50 or more years, it is very hard to pin down what part of the improvement of wines with age is due to one factor (oxygen ingress) and what to another (anaerobic).

Please read Tyson Stelzer's opening post of this

I've read it. In my opinion it says nothing significant about the _factors_ which influence wine's improvement with age, although it is convincing about the variability of cork permeability.

Hi Ian

Interesting discussion, although I tend to be on Michael's side of this argument. It would be a curious accident of history that man ended up chosing a closure that just by chance, and unknown to them. permitted this most minute of gas exchange. Cork was probably selected at the time of its early use simply because of its exceptional elasticity over a useful life of two decades. Any "gas exchange" must be a defect of the closure. That this defect might actually improve great wines that would benefit from that extra oxygen, that might be, but is that improvement significant w.r.t. a perfectly sealed bottle, and is it demonstrable?

Champagne evolves in the bottle, despite being under pressure (therefore migration can only be outward, if any...).

Some wines, Bandol notably, tend to go toward reduction. Under such oxygen starved conditions, aging is long and a defective cork might help matters... ;-)

I recommend that we jsut keep on opening those bottles, cork or Stelvin, and keep experimenting ;-)))

Cheers

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

I agree with you that cork was chosen as the "space age material" of its time for closing bottles, and that its ability to promote aging of the wine was not even considered. However, I can easily believe that cork-closed bottles may conform to our tastes more closely than e.g. Stelvin-closed bottles (at least for some people in some cases). It depends on the fact that we've all developed our taste for aged wine from cork-aged bottles. Just as the ancients preferred wine with pine sap flavors after many generations of drinking wine from pine tar-sealed amphorae, so too have we developed a taste for somewhat oxidized red wines. It's also like those audiophiles who actually prefer the sound of tube amps (or LPs) to solid state amps (or CDs). In the end, it's not about better or worse, it's about being different and what one is used to.

True.

OK :-)

Mark Lipton

The longer I think about the problem, the less I feel the question of oxigen ingress of real importance. Wine can age perfectly under cork, and wine can age perfectly under stelvin - just without TCA taint, fruit scalping and random oxidation. Makes *my* choice immediately evident.

M.

Is this true?( the part about migration can only be outward) I'm a little confused because some say that the pressure of the CO2 in the bottle would not prevent O2 from migrating in due to law of partial pressures.

Of course the way a sparkling wine's cork expands and forms a much tighter fit would still lead me to believe there is little exchange of gas, but I think there is some. I don't have a lot of experience with old Champagne, but my impression is that it does tend to lose it's pressure over time.

The best advice I've seen so far.

Andy

This is why I'd prefer crown caps for sparklers. There is absolutely no reason (except "romance" or "tradition" - which I don't want, especially when they concur with a double digit percentage figure of cork taint) to put corks into these bottles.

M.

Until 4 years ago I do not recall having encountered TCA on Champagne. In 2004 I found 4 bottles tainted, including two "old" ones.

Gimme a capsule anytime (hey, these bottles are under capsule most of their lives, they only put the cork in to "please" us... ;-)

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

Just becasue I'm curious...ha anyone had an experience of an Aussie wine that was corked, oxidized or tainted? About the closest I've come was with a bottle of 1991 Henschke Hill of Grace that was a bit tired and over the hill. I opened it in 2004 and it hadn't aged well but was it just too old, poorly stored before I bought it, or due to a cork malfunction....I'll never know for sure. In general I just haven't had a "bad" Aussie wine which I generally mark up to impeccable wine making techniques in a somewaht more modern environment from a technology standpoint. Bi!!

Mike Tommasi states:

"Until 4 years ago I do not recall having encountered TCA on Champagne. In 2004 I found 4 bottles tainted, including two "old" ones. Gimme a capsule anytime (hey, these bottles are under capsule most of their lives, they only put the cork in to "please" us... ;-)"

It was my impression that , at least in the past, Champage used a "crown" cap much as used on soft drink bottles in the US in the past. Most of our crown caps were converted to synthetic seals long ago. However I can remember crown caps that had a seal of ground cork mixed with a binding material. Your mention of a tainted older Champagne makes me wonder if the crown caps used for it had a composite cork seal. Of course the binding material would tend to seal the cork particles from contact with the wine, but perhaps not completely.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

On a visit last summer to Michel Turgy and Rene Geoffroy, they both used crown type seals with a plastic type liner much like is used in Stelvin...no cork inserts.

Bi!!

2005-01-22: 2002 d'Arenberg The Footbolt Shiraz (oxidized; back-up bottle OK) 2004-05-12: 2002 Simon Hacket Shiraz (2 mouldy bottles - TCA or bad wine?) 2004-03-21: 2000 Riverina Durif Warburn Show Reserve (1 bt cork) 2002-10-23: 2000 Paringa Individual Vineyard Shiraz (2 bt cork)

M.