Praying for salvation: when will we be rid of stinky corks?

Originally published in Sommelier Journal (January 2010):

The fall of 2009 was not a particularly kind on my longtime love/hate relationship with natural corks. It started with attendance at an East Coast wine festival, where I was asked to judge 24 chardonnays. Two of them are badly corked, requiring second bottle pours.

Then I was in a tony Portland restaurant, watching its celebrated chef do his thing. Thinking that this calls for something special, I ordered an $80 red Burgundy. Of course, the bottle is badly corked; so I asked for a second, which I received only after tangling with the manager, who refused to believe that an idiot like me (whom she didn’t know from Adam) could tell what a corked wine was.

Then I flew home to Denver, where I judged for a local wine festival. Out of some 100 wines (many of them undoubtedly finished with either screw caps or synthetic closures) landing on my table, two are badly corked; and a third one, mildly yet indubitably.

Think about it: if you ask most people in any part of the wine business what the current percentage of TCA tainted corks is, most of them will say less than 1% or 2% (obviously anybody’s guess). Yet drawing the logical conclusion from my recent spate of corked bottles, I’d venture to say that it’s a lot higher than we all think… or wish.

But is 4%-5% or even 1%-2% an acceptable failure rate? Heck no. Especially for us in the on-premise trade, where most of us follow the tradition of letting guests do their own tasting. For every hundred bottles that go out, neither four to five nor one to two ruined by 2,4,6-trichloroanisole is acceptable. That’s like saying it’s okay to be nice to 95% to 99% of our guests, and to the rest we say, “take a hike.”

So what’s our alternative? In recent years, of course, an increasing number of wineries have turned to screw caps. “I would like to thank you for attending this very hearfelt wake for the old stinker,” Randall Grahm is famously quoted to say, when dramatically announcing Bonny Doon’s transition from natural corks to Stelvin® capsules. Yet with all due respect: I hate serving screw capped wine in restaurants.


As it were, I’ve also had more than ten vintages worth of experience with customized wines bottled for my restaurants, as well as labeled by my own name, under various types of synthetic closures, which once seemed like a capital idea. It wasn’t. You know there are serious issues when your staff is coming to you with corkscrews snapped clean through by stuck synthetics; or worse, when your wines are turning from deep red or pale straw to unseemly brick or brown within the first year. If anything needs to be buried, it’s the entire concept of fake “corks.”

But wait, all is not lost. Over the past year more and more vintners have been turned on to a new type of aggregate, cork based closure produced by DIAM, with natural particles treated by a proprietary CO2 process that eradicates TCA along with some 150 other unnecessary molecules and compounds (previous aggregates, produced through steam cleaning processes, have proven to be nearly as susceptible to TCA as natural corks).

Imagine that: a closure with all the grace and elasticity of natural cork, but with more exacting, consistently low OTR (Oxygen Transmission Rate) in the sizing – since unlike natural cork, aggregates do not have the nooks and crannies that cause wines to oxidize at unpredictable rates – plus none of the reduction issues (i.e. sulfide stink) associated with many of the less than artfully produced screw capped wines being thrust upon us today.

Among the producers who have turned to DIAM: various Jackson Family Wines, Kunde, Roessler, Consentino and Korbel in the U.S.; Chandon, Hugel, Trimbach, Duboeuf, Jadot and Bouchard in France; Taltarni and Tyrells in Australia.

Will DIAM type closures prove to be the sommelier’s salvation, while preserving the integrity of the industry and ecological balance of our cork forests? Because he is what he is, I asked this of Randall Grahm. The response: “I have learned to become a bit skeptical about new wine closure technology, which sometimes overpromises. (certainly the case with synthetic corks). It does seem likely that the TCA problem may have been solved with this new product.”

Yet ever the Kierkegaardian, Grahm will question into the night: “What is the ideal level of (DIAM’s) permeability? If you were serious about a vin de garde, would not the closer you got to 0 still seem ideal? How do these closures mechanically perform over time? Certainly, this is where Stelvin still has the edge… it has been studied over decades. Still, when I win the lottery, I hope to put all my wine in specially designed glass ampoule, to some day be opened with swords!”