A wine closure/Baseball analogy

Will starting another wine closure thread get me tarred, feathered, sentenced to an eternity in the flames of hell
I guess I'll find out.
How about this...almost no one below the professional level uses wooden bats anymore. They break. Since aluminum bats don't break, they are much more practical and much cheaper in the long run. Their only functional flaw (if you can call it that) is that the ball comes off an aluminum bat faster and harder than one off a wood bat, and therefore it carries farther. At the professional level, the concern has mostly to do with the continuity and integrity of the record books (which are, as we well know, threatened by other modern technologies as well). But then there is the issue of aesthetics. The crack of wooden bat versus the ping of an aluminum bat. I hate that ping. In fact the sound of a wooden bat hitting a ball is one of the signatures of baseball.

Is this perhaps a good analogy for the screw cap vs cork controversy? Are not the leisurely pleasures of baseball analogous to the pleasures of wine? Is not the pro-cork argument like arguing for the aesthetics of wooden bats, and the screwcap argument like arguing for the practicality of metal bats? I guess for this analogy to work, you have to imagine yourself in the place of the person buying the bats, not just a fan watching the game.

[David M. Bueker]

Is this perhaps a good analogy for the screw cap vs cork controversy? Are not the leisurely pleasures of baseball analogous to the pleasures of wine? Is not the pro-cork argument like arguing for the aesthetics of wooden bats, and the screwcap argument like arguing for the practicality of metal bats? I guess for this analogy to work, you have to imagine yourself in the place of the person buying the bats, not just a fan watching the game.

Nope - way too big a stretch. Wooden bats are all that have ever been used at the pro level. They didn't start with tar soaked rags then move to wood as it became available.

Wood versus aluminum is a safety issue and a total distortion of historical records issue (would make steroids look like getting some extra sleep), and I have never heard any of the college world series commentators pining for the sound of a wooden bat.

I suppose it might work if you want to go the all tradition is good versus all new is bad route, but that's just so...well...fuddy-duddy (for lack of an actual term to describe what it is).

Professional baseball will never change to anything other than wood for the record-book reasons you cite, but below that level almost all of baseball has the adopted new technology. As to the safety issues, yes there are and I left it out, but metal bats were around for quite a while before people began to talk about safety and we don't know what problems with screw caps may yet surface.

and I have never heard any of the college world series commentators pining for the sound of a wooden bat.

My point exactly. The new technology (like screw caps) has been accepted. None the less, I bet if you surveyed fans in the stands of those college WS games you'd hear some pining for wood and the sound it makes (like cork). BTW I don't know where the efforts to develop bats made from other materials stands, but I know for a while there were efforts to make artificial bats from fiber glass and other man-made things that might better simulate wood in both performance and sound - like DIAM.
Anyway if you don't like this analogy how about the automatic transmission?

Anyway if you don't like this analogy how about the automatic transmission?

The auto tranny is one of the worst developments of the last 100 years. Allows people who really can't drive to simply point the vehicle, while sipping coffee, talking on their DingleBerry, reading a book, etc.

Bill

Bob, I think that a more apt analogy is with the audio market. When transistors were introduced in amplifiers, there was a vocal rearguard action from the die-hard tube amp enthusiasts who claimed that tube amps produced a "warmer" sound. The transistor advocates countered with lower THD numbers, but the tube amp supporters weren't swayed. Again, when digital recording technology was introduced, a vocal minority claimed that analogue recordings on vinyl sounded better. To this day, tube amps and vinyl records are still sold for those fringe elements. I expect that the same will happen with bottle closures. Some wine will continue to be bottled under cork, even as other closures become the norm. And, as always, de gustibus.

Mark Lipton

I understand Neil Young once said that listening to digitally recorded music was like looking at the world through a screen door. But I suspect digital technology has gotten better since then. There are of course analogies in photography I have avoided, being itb.

When transistors were introduced in amplifiers, there was a vocal rearguard action from the die-hard tube amp enthusiasts who claimed that tube amps produced a "warmer" sound.

Please, please, I beg of you, don't let Stuart see this thread!

When transistors were introduced in amplifiers, there was a vocal rearguard action from the die-hard tube amp enthusiasts who claimed that tube amps produced a "warmer" sound.

Please, please, I beg of you, don't let Stuart see this thread!

Hey! You're the one with mod status here. Why are you asking me not to let him see the thread?

Mark Lipton

In keeping with the thread drift here, I've exchanged POSTCARDS recently with some of my oldest friends recently. Remember them? What a beautiful way to communicate! Talk about old technology with warmth...there's a lot NOT to like about modernity.

A critical point is being missed here. Corks destroy wine. That's what's led to the search for alternatives. Not just to do something cheaper or faster. Romantics can defend plenty of things, despite inefficiencies, because they still get the job done. Talking to someone on a crackly old Bakelite phone because you love the romance of it doesn't alter the fact that you still communicate with them and manage to meet at the pub together at the right time. Heck, you can probably drive a well-maintained Model-A Ford through New York City just as fast as you can in a 6-series BMW. Sure, you won't have the sound system, and you'll be colder or hotter, but you'll still get from Battery Point to uptown for your appointment. And wielding a persimmon-headed 1-wood may be no real disadvantage if you're accurate enough either.

But when you opened your lovingly-cork-sealed wine, and it's rank with TCA, you no longer have the very object the cork was supposed to be protecting. You may as well try to defend a non-running Model A as a good car, or a Bakelite phone where the crackle is so loud you can't hear anything at all as a wonderful romantic object.

I'll defend anything old fashioned or romatic, as long as it still does what it was supposed to do, be it a little slower or more costly. That doesn't extend to always carrying two bottles of a wine in case the cork has destroyed the first one...
cheers,
Graeme

Is it the actual natural cork destroying the wine or is it TCA taint destroying the wine? Certainly we can put the bulk of the blame for the high incident of TCA tainted wines on the shoulder’s of the cork industry, but lets not forget the large distributors and bottlers of wine who choose to save some money and use shorter inferior quality cork not from one of the more reputable cork companies.

Salute

[David M. Bueker]

Victor - red herring alert. Your point does not hold water. All corks should be taint free.

Let’s not forget what Stuart said - They're all problematic. No one good, right answer.

As I lay my wines down to rest before consuming them not only do I want the enclosure to simple keep the wine in the bottle and the wine free from TCA taint (everyone has there own personal threshold for this fault and any other fault for that matter), I want the enclosure to provide a bottle environment that would be positive for the wine’s bottle maturation process. IMHO more or less this environment should be an “extension” of the type and style of wine that is produced and the winemaking techniques used to produce it. I want positive bottle aromas not negative bottle aromas to be produced. I don’t want undesirable odours and flavours to develop nor do I want positive and desirable sulfur compounds or acetic acid derivatives (esters) to convert into negative aspects (or as you would put it- aromatic complexity converting into a “fault”). So in the end all it comes down too really, is pick the lesser “evil” or in this case “lesser” wine fault.

Salute

What Graeme said.

The wine is the point, not the packaging. Anything that obscures or ruins the wine is ruining the whole point of the exercise.