Wine essays

Wine essays Have you ever spent more than you should have on a good bottle of wine? You cellared that bottle of wine for years, waiting for that optimal time to open it and share it with friends, only to have the all too familiar foul smell of must, mold, even a cardboard smell overtake your senses and ruin the experience? Numerous tests and personal experience have shown that as much as 10% of all the bottles of wine that incorporate natural corks fall victim to cork taint and some even to oxidation. This dilemma can be even worse, as James Laube points out In a retrospective tasting of 1991 vintage Cabernets, nearly 15 percent of the wines tasted were spoiled by bad corks(Laube). Winemakers and people in the wine industry have always known about this flaw in natural wood corks, yet have been forced to continue using them on their own product due to the lack of other options available. As the time has gone by some possible alternatives have been presented to winemakers and the general public l ike jugs with cheap metal screw caps intended for short term storage, a box where the wine is stored in a plastic bag, and plastic or synthetic corks which dont go through the same process which when natural corks have a run a high risk of becoming tainted. None of these methods caught on and were relegated to the cheapest of wine. Where as now in the last twenty-five years or so, one innovation has risen to the challenge that consumers have placed on the wine industry to heighten their product standards. This being the highly controversial screw-cap,or otherwise known in the wine industry as the Stelvin cap made by a French company named Pechiney Capsules . The Stelvin is generally considered state-of-the-art in screwcap technology(Walker 02). What makes it state-of-the-art is its design, What seals the bottle in a modern screw cap closure is a multiplayer wad of soft plastic on either side of a thin layer of foil. The ...