Are we screwing up?

The sommelier glides across to our table, seemingly on wheels, his feet imperceptible beneath his long starched apron. He draws a corkscrew from a small breast pocket with a flourish possibly gleaned from the magic circle handbook and, his expression assured and commanding, he slices the foil, extracts the cork and pours a small amount of wine into my glass in one fluid movement that leaves me with a desire to applaud. Only the unfamiliar formal surroundings and his questioning eyebrow curb the impulse. I smile at him, implying that a little more would be nice.

“Would sir care to taste the wine?” he asks. Thinking “No I’d rather drink it”, I dutifully pick up the glass, take a sniff and say “lovely” before he tops up. The wine in fact smells like a used Rugby kit that I’d once absent-mindedly left in a carrier bag for too long. Having never particularly enjoyed the dank aroma of socks soiled in another era, I had lied about my enjoyment. This is something I am aware, now eighteen years on from that first encounter with a sommelier, that the majority of people do when faced with the same situation. I hadn’t the desire to cause myself embarrassment should the wine be meant to taste that bad!

The wine was affected by TCA (2,4,6 Trichloroanisole), commonly known as ‘cork taint’. This chemical is found in a variety of sources such as cardboard, other types of wood and even tap water, though when present in corks it strips the wine of its aroma and flavour leaving instead a musty, mould like smell reminiscent of wet compost. When indicating the amount of wine affected by cork taint, figures vary. Cork producers indicate that it might be between 1 – 3%, figures most often used in the wine trade are 3 – 5% and synthetic closure manufacturers tend to favour a band of between 5 – 10%. Statistics, statistics! The figures will differ greatly as to the nature of the sample taken. The figures are higher when sampling wine at under £5, as there are economic pressures on producers from retailers to use inferior grades of cork that have undergone less testing. By using higher quality cork to stopper the wine the problem can be reduced significantly.

The wine industry’s answer over recent years has been to try to educate an initially reluctant public to accept synthetic closures instead of cork (early surveys found a preference for cork, with its associated romance and tradition). The tide is turning quickly and we are now welcoming synthetic stoppers and screwcaps onto our tables: it’s the modern thing for fresh thinkers not prepared to put up with inferior bottles. Non-cork stoppers currently account for around 5% of the UK market, though in an article written in Autumn 2003 one plastic stopper chairman confidently predicted, “in five years’ time 40-50% of all wine will be sealed under synthetic stopper”. Tesco is committed to having 50% of it’s range under screwcap by 2006, stating that “the answer is simple, better quality wines”. Less than 50% of New Zealand’s wine is now bottled with cork and the other countries are beginning to follow suit. Hugh Johnson, the world’s finest wine writer has joined the push for alternative stoppers stating that ‘Corks may play a part in the slow maturing of wines such as vintage Port, but for wines whose object is to be fresh and fruity, let’s have screw caps’.

Amorim, Portugal’s largest cork producer makes over 3 billion corks a year. If half of this were transferred to screw cap closures, the result would be an extra 4,500 tonnes of tin going to landfill, instead of a natural, biodegradable material. If half were transferred to synthetic closure instead it would be an extra 22,500 tonnes of plastic, instead of a stopper from a renewable source whose forests support a wide variety of wildlife, and that’s just one producer. In an article written in 2002 about the declining area of cork forests on the Iberian peninsular, the WWF stated “Something radical must happen to save the Iberian lynx, or it will be gone within a decade, making it the first feline species to go into extinction since the sabre tooth tiger in prehistoric times”. There is however relatively little written about environmental issues in the wine trade. Cork producers are spending millions on combating TCA, at the same time as trying to persuade bottlers and retailers to move to better quality of cork. This however is probably too late to stop the groundswell of opinion, as those with the money behind the push towards alternative stoppers tend to brand those promoting cork as traditionalists tied up with nostalgia and romance, afraid of modernising.

I have no desire to drink corked wine, nor do I hold sacrosanct tradition with regard to cork (including the theatre of the Sommelier), it’s what’s inside the bottle that matters. Though in our era of climate change, where as individuals and as industry we are required to ‘modernise’ by using sustainable and low energy sources for the materials we use, are we getting it wrong?

Francis Gimblett