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Wine: Explained | Wine Closures

Wine doesn’t have to be complicated, and here at Simple Theory we strive to break down walls and educate so we can all enjoy wine together! We are thrilled to launch our new series, Wine: Explained, where Melissa dives into quick wine tidbits to expand your wine knowledge and appreciation. First up: Melissa dives into the history of wine closures, a critical decision in a wine’s design. 

 

 
 
 
 
 
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Let’s start back in the beginning.

The beginning of wine is actually closed using pine sap and all the wine in the world tasted like a Christmas tree. Not a lot of wine was produced then, but as wine developed and the industry evolved, we found that one of the best closures for bottles of all sorts, not just wine, was this type of bark from a plant.

Natural Cork

Cork has a lot of great characteristics to it, such as it’s very bendable, despite looking very hard. Our machines here behind me when we go to bottle, we can get the cork down to about the size of your pinky and just push that right into the bottle and it re-expands to close to go around the shape of whatever the bottle is.

Cork also allows for some key aging factors for wine: Cork, because it’s porous, it’s part of a plant, it allows it a little bit of oxygen, and that little bit of oxygen helps the wine age over time, especially red wines, helps those tannins find each other and bind, making the wine feel smoother and more velvety over time.

However, there’s some key drawbacks to in the mid 90s, a lot of cork ended up with an issue called TCA. TCA is that cork taint, and it’s one of the reasons that you can send wine back from a restaurant. Cork taint has a smell of like an old base and wet cardboard, wet newspaper.

So, a lot of wine is switched out of natural cork and for another product called a synthetic cork.

Synthetic Cork

Synthetic cork is made completely of sugar cane. It is all a biodegradable plastic, and although it keeps the wine in the bottle, it allows in a lot of oxygen, sometimes accelerating the aging process and doesn’t have the best age ability depending on the style of wine.

Screw Cap

The screw cap has the perception of being the cheapest one out there.

However, let me tell you that this is the best closure and most of all winemakers will agree.

Screw caps have the unique functionality of having an interchangeable plastic liner on the inside, and we can choose this liner depending on how much oxygen we want to come into the wine during aging.

So, if you want a wine that has a lot of oxygen, say for a longer aging time, we will pick one kind of liner. But, if we want a wine that has no oxygen ingress, say for a fresh white crisp wine that we want to be as fresh tomorrow as it was the day we bottled it, we’ll pick a different liner.

The Conclusion

Due to the variability, the cost effectiveness (3 cents versus over a dollar per bottle), the screw cap is the best closure on the market – stop thinking that this means it is a cheap wine. It means that your winemaker is trying to preserve the quality.

Stay tuned as we continue to deconstruct the technical elements of the cellar.

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