The lowdown on Kiwi gin, some of our favourite wines and the annual NZ Coffee and Chocolate Show.
Screw caps ensure that a wine is presented as the winemaker intended.
A wine is ready for bottling when it enters the phase the winemaker intended for its flavour, texture and structure. The final steps after bottling include the closure and labels.
The main closure used for wine in New Zealand prior to 2000 was cork bark. Cork’s flexibility and sponginess made it an easy choice for its primary purpose – as a plug to stop the wine from escaping. After 2000, the preferred closure became screw caps. The key reason for this change in Aotearoa was the high failure rate of corks, which caused wine spoilage at a level that was deemed unacceptable. The manufacturing and cleaning processes of the imported corks fell short of the expectations of many producers who had to deal with the financial loss and potential bad reputation of spoiled wines. As a result, the stelvin closure was widely adopted, with great success.
As someone who works in the wine industry, I am often asked bottle-closure questions (especially when travelling overseas). I prefer screw caps for two reasons: screw caps do not impart the flavour of cork bark into the wine (corks do); and no two corks are the same, which can mean variability in cork-closed wines is more likely. There is consistency with screw caps, which means the wine is presented as the winemaker intended. Incidentally, there is no more or less oxygen ingress into a wine through screw caps compared with corks.
One of the key barriers to screw caps internationally seems to be the supposed glamour of pulling a cork. There’s been significant improvements with cork production in the past decade. Agglomerate corks have dramatically decreased the incidence of cork-spoiled wines, but the choice remains yours.