At one time, wines with screw caps were sold under names like Thunderbird or Mad Dog 20/20 and were usually sipped from a paper bag. Today, screw caps can be found on everything from $2.50 bottles of fortified bum wine to $250 bottles of Plumpjack Cabernet Sauvignon. That’s because the wine industry has come to a realization that challenges a 400-year-old tenet of the wine business: Perfectly good wine is routinely being ruined by corks.

“An overt ‘corkiness,’ where you actually determine that the wine is defective because of a bad cork, is estimated to be anywhere from 2% to 6% of all wine,” says Randall Graham, founder of Santa Cruz’s Bonny Doon Vineyards. “But that number doesn’t really address the bottles that are affected ever so slightly, making the wine slightly different than the wine next to it. In that case, the number has to be much higher. You could even argue that 100% of the bottles are corked, because they all taste different by virtue of having been sealed with a cork.”

The “corked” wine that Graham refers to is wine that has been exposed to trichloroanisole (TCA), a chemical byproduct of the chlorine bleaching used to remove natural molds and fungi from the wood cork as it is harvested. In microscopic amounts, TCA can make the finest chardonnay reek like sweaty gym socks. And in lower, hard-to-detect concentrations, wine flavors can be subtly changed.

“A low concentration of TCA is like a blanket laying over the other aromas and flavors of the wine,” claims Patrick Pickett, winemaker for Napa’s Pepi Winery. “It decreases the aromas and flavors that I, as a winemaker, am trying to raise up to the highest level. And it’s all because of a five-to-50 cent cork. Compared to the cost of producing a bottle of wine, it’s miniscule.”

Pepi, Bonny Doon and several other prominent California vineyards have shaken up the wine industry by moving their entire product lines (hundreds of thousands of cases worth) away from the contaminating presence of the cork. Their bottles now proudly feature the Stelvin, a style of screw cap developed by French packaging company Pechiney and manufactured in American Canyon, California. The Stelvin looks less like the kind of cap that would seal a bottle of barbecue sauce and more like something that belongs on a wine bottle.

“Everyone on the technical side agrees that a screw cap is probably the best closure right now; the best solution to keep your wine as you make it,” claims a spokesperson for Pechiney (she refused to let us identify her by name, but it rhymes with “Barbara Devic”). “The resistance is more often coming from marketing teams, because they don’t know how the customer is going to react.”

Indeed, negative customer perception seems to be the major factor (aside from capital expenditures on new sealing equipment) in preventing a switch to the more trustworthy, less difficult-to-open Stelvin… but consumer acceptance has been steadily growing. In 2002, Pechiney sold two million Stelvin closures to various wineries. In 2003, that number more than doubled to five million. This year, Pechiney expects to cap over 10,000,000 bottles with their trademarked screw-on closure.

“There’s a consumer perception that the screw cap is cheap or they love the romance that’s associated with the cork,” says Kristen Hager, founder of R.H. Phillips, another major California vineyard to have made the switch to a (non-Stelvin) screw cap. “But wine is a beverage and we really believe that it’s for everyday drinking and it shouldn’t have this intimidation factor where you have this big ceremony, you put the cork on the table and somebody smells it. People should just enjoy it like they do any beverage – without thinking about it.”

In fact, winemakers are not only counting on the screw cap to preserve the integrity and consistency of their product, but to reverse statistics that show wine lagging far behind other alcoholic beverages in annual sales. Recent studies estimate the average American consumes approximately two gallons of wine per year. Compared to the 50-gallon-per-person averages of most European countries, winemakers see room for massive growth… if only they could get rid of the cork.

“There are certain companies, and certain consumers, who don’t ever want anything but a cork in their bottle,” says Pepi Vineyards’ Pickett. “They feel that it’s a sin, almost, to do anything else. But the tide is changing.”

For those who demand their wine be opened with a “pop” (if not a special tool), there are many wines that have abandoned the cork in favor of… a cork. Synthetic corks, like those colorful plastic plugs made by Supreme Corq Inc., offer the same protection from oxygen as a wooden cork, only without all those bouquet-altering chemicals. Founded by Dennis Burns, who also used his expertise in plastics to invent Pro-tec hockey helmets and Gargoyle sunglasses, Supreme Corq has been a popular alternative with winemakers worried about TCA contamination, but unwilling to invest in new bottling equipment. The hard plastic corks are used in a majority of the wines coming from Australia and New Zealand, and are finding their way into more American brands, like Kendall Jackson and Beringer.

“Ten years ago, the only question was ‘What grade of cork do you want?’” says Supreme Corq’s director of marketing, Joyce Steers-Greget. “I personally think that the [synthetic corks] are easier to extract than treebark corks, because they don’t break or crumble. That’s a big obstacle to people drinking wine – they don’t know how to get the cork out.”

The cork is perceived to be such a barrier to new customers that some wineries are thinking past the cork vs. screw cap debate entirely. Hollywood legend and Napa Valley innovator Francis Ford Coppola has just released a product that his label, Niebaum-Coppola, has been developing for years: Wine in a can. Yes, you read that right. Wine. In a can.

“You know Francis has made a career out of, to turn a cliché, thinking outside of the bottle,” puns Niebaum-Coppola president, Erle Martin. “Wine has become pigeonholed as a special occasion beverage for a large portion of the public. A lot of that is the stigma of the cork, and there is a snob appeal that is glamorous and special, but these are impediments and barriers to the industry. So I firmly believe that this is an important way to open the door to a lot of potential new consumers.”

So far, the consumers seem to agree. The canned wine, dubbed the Sofia Mini (after the label’s bottled sparkling wine, Sofia, which itself was named after the Oscar-winning director’s Oscar-winning daughter) is sold in four-packs of skinny, pink, six-ounce cans. After a test run of 5,000 cases flew off shelves, Martin knew that this once-unthinkable idea would be a huge success.

“People are averse to change, and there are still some people who look at it and say, ‘I just can’t wrap my mind around the idea of wine in a can,’” he says. “But 95% of the people who see this product, they see the four pack and they are delighted. They understand that it’s okay to drink wine at the beach or by the pool or on a boat or on occasions that we’re finding where Sofia is appropriate.”

And if wine in a can bucks tradition, how about wine in a disposable juice box? Three Theives, a Napa winery, will be releasing their imported Bandit Bianco label in Tetra Paks, otherwise known as “fancy milk cartons.” The enclosures, which are made of highly-compressed layers of paper and aluminum foil sandwiched between layers of polyurethane, cost only 15 cents each, which may be all the incentive some vineyards need to make the change.

“The industry is catching on. It’s just a matter of time,” says Bonny Doon Vineyard’s Graham. “It’s like the Berlin Wall. It had a lot of hairline cracks, and nobody knew exactly when it was going to fall, and then it just kind of happened all at once. It’ll be the same thing with the cork. There’s going to be slowly more people leaving it, and then in a very short period of time, everyone will [abandon it]. I can’t tell you if it’s two years or four years, but in the next 10 years, for sure.”

will screw caps cheapen your wine drinking experience? Email us: Editors@thewavemag.com