The Truth About Wine Sealed with Cork Versus a Screw Cap

(Parade) - Myth says a bottle of wine sealed with a screw cap is inferior to one stopped with a cork. The truth? Unless you plan to age your bottle for decades, the only thing a cork guarantees is a one-in-twelve chance of your bottle being, well, “corked.” It also guarantees a 100% chance you’ll need a cork screw on hand to open it easily–obviously inconvenient if you’re unprepared.

For those looking to buy a bottle today and enjoy it within the next ten years or so, repeat after me: Screw the cork, choose the cap.

A bottle sealed with a cap, or even a synthetic stopper ensures your wine will not be contaminated with TCA, a musty by-product of the process many wineries use to keep things sterile. While drinking a bottle contaminated with TCA will not make you ill, it will offer a musty bouquet of wet cardboard, or just taste “off.” Wine presenting this unfortunate condition is said to be “corked” or have “cork taint.”

Does this mean you should avoid all wines with a cork enclosure? Absolutely not. Many great wineries have not yet made the transition to screw cap enclosures for various reasons, the most common being they’re concerned their wine will be perceived as cheap. But as enology instructor Tim Donahue says, “Winemakers will spend years on site selection, soil amendments, clonal selection, canopy design and spray programs. They will monitor water stress, leaf pull, fruit thin, measure phenolic data… use a 100% sterile bottling line and bottles, and then, just for the hell of it, shove an old piece of tree bark in the neck of the bottle and hope everything works out.”

92% of the time it does work out, and for the one-in-twelve chance it doesn’t, write it off as being “lucky” enough to finally know what a bad bottle smells like.