I have on occasion voiced the opinion I prefer cork as a closure for red wine. Screw caps have done one good thing. They made the Portuguese take notice and dramatically improve cork performance. Also, because there are now only a few Australian wineries who use cork, they are being noticed and no longer at the end of the queue receiving the worst product. So the question now is, if you have a perfect cork, why would you use screw cap? The answer is, it is easy and 95% of wine is drunk within 24 hours of purchase. But what about the other 5%?
I assume most of my readers anywhere in the world store some wine in one form or another. The other day screw cap did it for me. I opened a bottle of Felton Road Block 5 and served it blind to a group of experienced tasters. People picked Central Otago straight away, and the age was estimated between 2014 and 2017. The wine was from 2008. The wine just had not aged much. Central Otago produces powerful Pinot Noir, but we can never experience it in the way we can an older Burgundy wine, matured by minimal oxygen exchange under cork.
Bring back cork for red wine!
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