how do those synthetic corks fair compared to real cork?

Ogopogo,

The best advice I can give is to simply Google "synthetic corks" and start clicking.

Here is one link that echoes my experience with broken wine screws.
Cursed corks

Please excuse the English lesson, but it is "How do those synthetic corks FARE". I wouldn't bother you except that it is in a heading.

The biggest problem with synthetic corks is that they do not seal well, and the wines oxidize rapidly. This is especially true of molded types, while extruded types can do a bit better.

In any case, they are poor substitutes for bark in that regard.

The Wikipedia entry "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_wine_closures" is a good primer with lots of links:

quote:

Originally posted by pape du neuf:
Please excuse the English lesson, but it is "How do those synthetic corks FARE". I wouldn't bother you except that it is in a heading.

I clicked on the link thinking the Cork Fair was like a carnival with turkey legs, amusement rides, and carneys.

As mentioned above the gist of synthetic corks is that it does not provide a sufficient barrier from oxygen suitable for long term storage. The problem with screw caps is that the barrier from oxygen is is too good and thus does not allow the wine to age well. Furthermore with the screwcap type closures, some wineries experienced a compromised seal when cases of newly made wine were stacked too high. The weight of the wines above a given case of wine would push down on the metal cap seal and butterfly the edges of the cap outward which essentially broke the seal. This hasn't been as much of a problem in recent times now that wineries know this but it becomes a storage problem for larger producers.

Having said that, there is a reason beyond the perception of quality why so many wine makers still use natural cork. Synthetic enclosures may one day be good enough to replace natural cork, but thus far natural cork is still the way to go.

quote:

Originally posted by Grapehunter:
The problem with screw caps is that the barrier from oxygen is is too good and thus does not allow the wine to age well.

Whereas I think the screwcap issue is outside the scope of the request of this thread, I nonetheless must take exception to that statement.

Ageing under screwcap is just as good as ageing under cork, and cannot be cited as a problem.

The most reliable studies show that screwcaps have oxtrans rates the same as the best corks, only more consistently, and it seems, for longer.

For the sake of argument, and we assume the studies (e.g. ACF, AWRI) are wrong, and screwcaps have lower oxtrans rates, that means merely that the wines will age more slowly, not worse.

Is there some ideal span within which wine should mature? How long should wines live? When should they reach their peak? These are stylistic issues to be adressed by the winemaker, and ultimately, the consumer. I do not see the benefit in allowing the closure to exert its own, random will, in the way cork does.

Imagine that the cloth-and-pitch closure advocates of antiquity launched the same claim against cork, that it seals too well; would their lament bear credibility from our vantage point today?

I HATE synthetic or plastic corks!
I've had trouble removing the black plastic corks from more than one wine bottle to the point that I threw away three bottles after breaking two wine screws trying to remove one plastic cork from a bottle.

Plastic sucks and is not an acceptable alternative to natural cork in my opinion.

quote:

Originally posted by Grapehunter:
The problem with screw caps is that the barrier from oxygen is is too good and thus does not allow the wine to age well.

As chaad mentioned, this is incorrect. Examples of screw capped Australian white wines from the 1970's have aged very well. There are certainly different issues involved in the winery to avoid reductive faults (as a consequence of the low oxygen transfer rates), but once these are addressed, there is no reason to suggest wines under stelvin will not age well.

I feeled burned everytime I see a leaking cork or drink a corked bottle of good wine. I just picked up a bottle of 2004 Puligny-Montrachet 1er cru from a good producer, while on a trip a week ago. After driving all day and getting to the hotel, I saw sticky wine dripping down the bottle. The cork was leaking. 67 Euros spent, (that's like $500 US Dollars given the current exchange rate (not really but it seems that way)) and the wine shop was hundreds of miles away, and I hadn't noticed the leak until later. Synthetics/screw tops may leak when they are under extreme pressure, but corks leak for no good reason other than imperfection or natural variations in the wood grain. As for ageability, I have never seen proof one way or the other. There are lots of theories, oxygen permeabilty rates, a few anecdotal stories, that sort of thing, but know one truely knows. Proof won't come until someone bottles some Bordeaux and/or some other ageable wines using both synthetics and cork, stores them in identical environments, and periodically tastes the two, side by side, over the course of decades. Now someone just needs to step up to the plate and get this experiment started. I volunteer to taste.

Isn't Plumpjack performing the experiment you describe? I can't remember what year they started, but they are selling their Cabernet in two packs, one with cork and the other with a screwcap. I have also heard that for the on-premise market, their accounts have a choice of one or the other, and the screwcap sold out faster.

quote:

Originally posted by AndrewO:
Isn't Plumpjack performing the experiment you describe? I can't remember what year they started, but they are selling their Cabernet in two packs, one with cork and the other with a screwcap. I have also heard that for the on-premise market, their accounts have a choice of one or the other, and the screwcap sold out faster.

I believe they bottled the 1997 in this manner. I don't know about subsequent vintages.

quote:

Originally posted by Roentgen Ray:
I feeled burned everytime I see a leaking cork or drink a corked bottle of good wine. I just picked up a bottle of 2004 Puligny-Montrachet 1er cru from a good producer, while on a trip a week ago. After driving all day and getting to the hotel, I saw sticky wine dripping down the bottle. The cork was leaking. 67 Euros spent, (that's like $500 US Dollars given the current exchange rate (not really but it seems that way)) and the wine shop was hundreds of miles away, and I hadn't noticed the leak until later. Synthetics/screw tops may leak when they are under extreme pressure, but corks leak for no good reason other than imperfection or natural variations in the wood grain. As for ageability, I have never seen proof one way or the other. There are lots of theories, oxygen permeabilty rates, a few anecdotal stories, that sort of thing, but know one truely knows. Proof won't come until someone bottles some Bordeaux and/or some other ageable wines using both synthetics and cork, stores them in identical environments, and periodically tastes the two, side by side, over the course of decades. Now someone just needs to step up to the plate and get this experiment started. I volunteer to taste.

Do not categorize synthetic cork and screwcaps together, they are quite different.

Synthetic corks are not ageworthy. Proven. Period.

Screwcaps are ageworthy. Proven. Period.

We can talk about whether or not screwcapped wines age like corked wines, and we can even talk about whether screwcaps age too slowly, but the fundamental question, are they ageworthy, has been adressed, and the answer is yes.

You say you've never seen proof one way or the other; you obviously haven't looked. Don't rely on me or any other unvetted, cyberjockey to give you the facts, go get the info from reputable sources yourself.

i have seen those more expensive marilyn merlot series of bottles that are in a display box that have a red molten (at the time of dipping the bottle into) solidified coating..........and i asked the liquor store expert about why these diplay wines are not displayed on their sides due to my concerns of the corks drying out,etc...... and he replied that they are coated specifically in the liquid coating that solidifies and it is essentially like a screw cap from that point on. This is why these bottles can be upright for display purposes...

quote:

Originally posted by Ogopogo DUDE:
i have seen those more expensive marilyn merlot series of bottles that are in a display box that have a red molten (at the time of dipping the bottle into) solidified coating..........and i asked the liquor store expert about why these diplay wines are not displayed on their sides due to my concerns of the corks drying out,etc...... and he replied that they are coated specifically in the liquid coating that solidifies and it is essentially like a screw cap from that point on. This is why these bottles can be upright for display purposes...

I don't know what Marilyn is coated with, I presume wax. If that's the case, what he said is utter BS. Wax is highly oxygen permeable, and anyway, cork is not, regardless of capsule or coating. You could but a glob of Tutti Frutti chewing gum on top the cork, or wrap it it in lead capsule without any appreciable effect on oxtrans rate.

That said, I also don't believe that corks dry out and fail. In fact, the opposite seems apparent to me, that they get saturated (with wine) and loose their spring compression against the bottleneck (i.e. fail).

Bark gets dried to about 7% or 10% humidity before punching for stoppers, and the boiling process that follows only raises humidity of the best corks to about 20%. The bark is pretty water impermeable, which is exactly why it has been the stopper of choice for so long.

Additionally, if you look at corks that have been pulled and are just sitting around, I guarantee you that every one is swollen beyond its newly pulled dimensions. That's exactly the compressive force that does the sealing in the neck, and you can see it in corks that have not been in contact with wine for some time. I've never, ever, seen a cork shrink.

When I see a failed cork, it is invariably saturated with wine, and has lost its compression on the bottle neck.

I have maintained for years that the practice of storing wine horizontally is a spatial economy. You can actually store more bottles in a given space if they are stacked horizontally than if they are upright (vertical). Hell, you can't even stack upright without shelving, not to mention that upright storage makes counting and ID-ing bottles more difficult!

I've seen lots of bottles stacked upon themselves, without any racking (very economical) in caves in Paris and Rome, which gave rise to my position that it has everything to do with space, and nothing with the cork.

Screwcap is the way to go and that's where the industry should head itself. I've been burnt too many times with an expensive bottle of wine going bad on me because of oxidation or being corked. Just don't get that with screwcaps.

Gigond Ass, you are correct, Plumpjack Reserve Cab has been bottled with both screw cap closures and cork since at least 1997. James Laube's 10yr retrospective will try some of these wines this year. Hopefully he gets to try both a cork and screw type bottlings.

Chaad: When you are talking about the proven track record of screw caps, are you talking about the saranax closures or the tin closures? Plumpjack Reserve uses the tin of course, but I don't know what other producers use. And like I said before, I am looking for more than anecdotal evidence: a few wines of similar style bottled in 1997 that age fine do not prove a system as acceptable in my book. I suppose you can be a uniter or a divider. I'm more of a lumper, so when I say synthetic, I am referring to any type of closure that doesn't come from a living biological organism. A metal-polymer product is synthetic in my book. I would then further catagorize synthtic closures as glass/crystal, polymer cork-like closures, and screwtop closures. As for proven ageability, I don't think California wines fit the bill. I don't routinely put Cali-wines into my cellar expecting them to last 10+years. Most of them, even the better bottlings, fair better in the first decade than the second. Sure, there are some timeless bottlings of California Cabernet, but most of them drink better young. When referring to ageabiltiy, I was thinking more along the lines of Bordeaux and Burgundy. I've not seen a single Vosne-Romanee or Gevry-Chambertin with a screw top. The Classified crus in Bordeaux don't come too often (any?) with screw-caps. There are Bordeaux wines that are 60 years old that still are drinking well under cork. Now, I'm not a fan of cork, but the point I'm trying to get across is that I have some nice wines that I plan to keep for 20+ years, and it's not been proved that screw caps are the best choice. Maybe they are, and I hope we do get a better system than corks, but until you show me a 1945 Cheval Blanc with a synthetic screw cap closure, I don't think that there is ample evidence that screw caps are better than cork. We can theorize that they are, but theories are often change to agree with the facts, not the other way around. BTW, I miss Zingermans, what a place. As for not having done my reading, I do try and read as much as I can on the subject because I am genuinely interested in it, but am also interested in finding out what other people know without necessarily showing all my cards. I am interested it reading George Taber's book: To Cork or not to Cork: Tradition, Science, and the battle for the wine bottle, but it doesn't come out until 10-9-07.

Sorry this is in two posts, I had to run off for a moment. Anyway:

I would be more than willing to purcahse an Etude or Shafer Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon with a screw top, but I'm not so sure that I would have purchased my 2005 Domaine Armand Rousseau Chambertin in a screwtop, had I been offered that option. I pray the bottle won't be corked and that the cork doesn't leak, but, for the time being, I feel more comfortable with my Cote-de-Nuits under cork, than I would were they under srewcap. Pinots can have reduction problems due to conservative pumping over and what not during the wine making process. Also, what will those molecules in the Tin or saranax closures do to the wine after 35 years. I don't know, nobody knows. The only way to know is to put a screwtop on a Grand Cru and wait 35 years. There are so many slow chemical reactions occuring in wine that the chemisty is too complicated to figure out, even if you were an organic and inorganic theoretical chemist from the U of M. The synthetic and metallic components of a screwcap could potentially have adverse effects upon the long-term (15yr+) changes that occur when a wine ages. That's my only question when it comes to screwtops. I'm fine with screw tops of New World wines, in fact, I like them a lot.

quote:

Originally posted by Roentgen Ray:
...but until you show me a 1945 Cheval Blanc with a synthetic screw cap closure, I don't think that there is ample evidence that screw caps are better than cork.

Well, asking for the impossible makes this conversation just about pointless, doesn't it?

quote:

Originally posted by Roentgen Ray:
There are so many slow chemical reactions occuring in wine that the chemisty is too complicated to figure out, even if you were an organic and inorganic theoretical chemist from the U of M.

???
Are you having feelings of paranoia?

Ah, but what is impossible today, isn't necessarily impossible 40 years from today. As for the chemisty comment, I was just thinking about my alternate life number three point six, where I would have been a chemist. I spent a summer in Midland, MI working for Dow on polymers and surfactants and I loved both organic and inorganic chemistry and really liked this guy that was a theoretical chemist from Northwestern. Anyway, that's alternate life path 3.6, somewhere between 2.2 where I run a restaurant and 4.7 where I travel the country and rock climb, living off of pennies a day and philosophiesing about wine and human relationships and the cosmos...yes, I know, I edit all my messages because I usually spell a few words wrong and usually say something that makes absolutely no sense what soever (no comments on that one please).

good luck with this windmill chaad

Legends, rumors and misinformation about closures is almost impossible to get across to people. They believe what they want, facts don't count.

Are you going to take on getting accurate information about sulfites next?

This is kind of related ... but in an off topic sort of way.

I was reading one magazine where they were talking about this very topic. They said that the environment is also a major concern in what type of cap to put on a bottle. Suprisingly, there is this whole ecosystem of cork trees that depends on cork harvesting for wine bottles. If we all went synthetic or screw-cap they believe that the area would be abandon by humans and ultimately die off.

I had never heard that argument for cork before.