Plastic Cork Ruins Another Wine ('05 Brun)

[David M. Bueker]

Opened my last bottle of 2005 Terres Dorees (J. P. Brun) Beaujolais Blanc last night. It has started to turn in color & the wine was notably oxidized.

If you have any, hope for the best & drink up.

To any producer using plastic corks: STOP!!!

So are you willing to accept other alternate closures or are you a "cork or nothing" sort of guy?

[David M. Bueker]

So are you willing to accept other alternate closures or are you a "cork or nothing" sort of guy?

Give me screwcaps or give me death.

David,

I did not know there were significant problems with plastic corks. Are the problems specific to one brand(s) or are they across the board with all brands of plastic corks?

[Robin Garr]

David,

I did not know there were significant problems with plastic corks. Are the problems specific to one brand(s) or are they across the board with all brands of plastic corks?

Without trying to answer for David, it's my impression from experience and from talks with people in the business that synthetics in general don't seem to be proving out for storage much past a year or two. I have a slight impression that the solid plastic plug type is worse than the "slick-sleeve" type with the foamy interior, but like David, I've encountered what appears to be a non-trivial percentage of wines under plastic cork that seemed old before their time.

Screw caps don't have this problem. There's room for some debate there regarding reductiveness and the minutiae of oxygen transmission and its effect on very long-term aging. But I think the market is starting to reflect the general opinion that screwcaps are more reliable than synthetics for any period longer than a few years.

This isn't to say that there's not a place for synthetics, but that place seems to be primarily for wines intended to be drunk within a year or two of bottling. (That would include Beaujolais blanc from many producers.)

[David M. Bueker]

I'm certainly not trying to imply that this wine was going to be a long ager, but it fell off the clif really quickly. My last bottle before this was only a couple of months ago, and it was fine and dandy. There's too much variability with the plastic jobs even for short-term cellaring of good wines.

This is the kind of wine that would be ideal in a screw cap, even for the skeptics.

Thanks for the clarification and warning, David! Luckily, I only have three bottles in my cellar that have plastic corks. Also, I cannot recall ever having an issue with a bottle sealed with a screw cap.

To briefly repeat a report I made here some time back, I once participated in a strictly unscientific comparsion of the same wine (it happened to be a Sauvignon Blanc) bottled under natural cork and synthetic of the foam core/slick sleeve type Robin mentioned (Nomacorq, to be specific). In a single-blind tasting, it was the unanimous opinion of those tasting that the wine under the synthetic was less fresh than that under normal cork - and this after only about six months in the bottle. By itself, no one would have noticed a problem with the synthetic-corked wine but with the opportunity to compare it to the conventionally bottled version, the damage was apparent in even that short a time in the bottle. I have no idea what the mechanism is but it seems clear that oxygen must somehow make its way around/through synthetic stoppers, no matter how solid they seem or hard to remove they may be. If wineries insist on using synthetic stoppers I agree they should be limited to drink-me-now wines but I question whether they are appropriate even then.

Like all the other alternative enclosures they are experimenting with different foam cores (synthetic sleeve/ foam core) and liners (screw-cap) trying to figure which is best suited for a given style and particular wine.

Salute

[David M. Bueker]

Like all the other alternative enclosures they are experimenting with different foam cores (synthetic sleeve/ foam core) and liners (screw-cap) trying to figure which is best suited for a given style and particular wine.

And so far I haven't seen one that worked well enough to bother. Hold on tight, as in about a year I will have 5 year old screw capped wines in my cellar!

I don't have a big back-library of them, but it was very comforting to open (in 2006, I think) a screwcap-sealed 1997 Pewsey Vale Contours riesling. It tasted just as a 9-yo Eden riesling should.
No doubt by virtue of my geography, I have access to more older screwcapped wines than you - I have Grosset Clare rieslings from 2000, 01, 02 and some subsequent years all under screwcap, and even things like 2001 Cullen Cab-merlot, which on the basis of a cork-sealed 1999 drunk earlier this year, ought to be ready in about 30 years...!
If you're ever down this way, I'll open the oldest screwcap wine I have, just to see how it's doing!
My latest statistics have some 23% of my 450-bottle cellar under screwcap, but naturally the weight is toward riesling, along with Hunter semillon in more recent years.
cheers,
Graeme