A lot of wine writers have spoken about the ongoing debate regarding how best to keep wine in a bottle but I thought that I would chime in with my two cents. Corks, to me, are synonymous with wine. What are the first images conjured in your mind’s eye when the word wine is mentioned? For me it’s usually a wineglass or a bottle filled with the wonderful stuff. That bottle in my imagination is invariably accompanied by a cork – that most unique creation of nature, perfectly adept at maintaining and aging wine in an almost symbiotic relationship. I think it’s reasonable to say that the connotations we have and the associations we make are based often on tradition. So wine, a substance whose entire life span, from creation to consumption, is governed by tradition, has even stronger mental associations then most things. If you went to a fancy restaurant in North Beach and your wine was served to you in a pint glass I doubt you’d shrug, assume that they were just trying to be trendy and sip. No. You, being the gracious person that you are, would politely ask your server if perhaps they had a normal wine glass available. Sure, there are plenty of reasons that a wine glass is shaped the way it is: So that the wine is directed to the most suitable spot on your tongue; so that when you hold it your hand does not affect the temperature of the wine; so that your grubby fingerprints don’t mar the surface of the glass… But that’s not why you send the pint glass back. You do it because it’s just wrong. Now this conservative point of view might seem at odds with the California anything-goes attitude and approach to winemaking. I believe though, that that viewpoint doesn’t come from a sort of dogma which asserts that tradition is inherently stifling, but rather from a perspective of “Hey, if this really does work better then why the heck not use it?” If you show me a wine closure today that is superior to a natural cork in every way then I would be on board and gung-ho about it. But the fact is that insofar it looks as though we got it right the first time. In the 1600s, when glass bottles started to come into wide use, a clever man named Dom Perignon rediscovered the use of cork as a natural stopper and modern science has yet to better it. It allows the wine to breathe at a remarkably apt rate. It keeps the wine clean – as Robert says it acts like a “magnet for off flavors”. And from the beginning of the industry, the production of cork serves as a remarkable example of sustainable agriculture as the cork is harvested from the outer layers of the bark of Quercus suber (which is actually good for the tree) leaving it to grow back. In fact, the only threat to the cork trees comes from the decline of the cork industry due to a rise in synthetic and alternative closures. While companies that manufacture synthetic corks made from plastic tout that their product is 100% recyclable, they often forget to add the footnote that that statistic is only true if the cork makes it to the recycling plant. Deerfield uses natural cork on all of our wines, except for one vintage of Sauvignon Blanc where we decided to dabble with Zorks (which are pretty neat actually) and I hear it from Robert that we aim to keep it that way. Cork surely has its drawbacks but until some mind blowing revolution occurs in the future I’ll look forward each time to that satisfying pop rather than the crack of a screwcap.
Also Robert recently added his opinion on natural cork to the public forum. It can be found on Deerfield's Facebook page.
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