There’s been lots of debate in the wine industry in recent years about the best ways to close a wine bottle.  There’s good old fashioned cork: a classic for the past 4,000 years (!), offers breath-ability for the wine…but can degrade and spoil an otherwise terrific bottle.  After all, who likes to pick bits of cork out of their Cabernet?  Then there’s plastic: sturdy and reliable.  But, man, am I the only one who has trouble unscrewing a plastic cork from a wine opener?  I always have to call over Mr. Caps to lend a hand.  Next, the handy-dandy screw top: perfect in a pinch.  Randall Grahm and his band of lunatic geniuses out at Bonny Doon in Santa Cruz, CA, were among those who first legitimized the screw top (or “Stelvin closure” for the fancy-pants in the group) with premium wines and others have since followed.  And then there’s the glass cork.  I knew they existed, but until recently they took on the status of urban myth in my mind – sort of the way Carrie Bradshaw felt about the Manolo Mary Janes.  But the other evening I was attempting to open a bottle of French rose and, suddenly, voila: there it was, the elusive glass cork.  Beautiful if for no other reason than its rarity.

So is there a preferred method of bottle closure?  I started doing some Google searching and came across a remarkable data point: according to the book, To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle by George Taber, wine closures are a $4 billion business worldwide.  Four billion dollars spent annually on the humble cork and its cousins?  Who knew??!!

When asked his opinion about the best bottle closure method, Taber responded, “Is it (the wine) meant for long aging? Is it meant to be drunk fast? I think that what you are going to be seeing in the future is winemakers adapting the closure to the wine that they are creating…what they want to create in the bottle. This is because the closures really do have a big impact on what the wine does….The other thing is — and this could change — to date, there is no perfect closure. Every closure has its weaknesses and every closure has its strengths. I think that it behooves, especially the cork and screw cap producers, to solve their problems so that the consumer can be more confident. So they know they are not spending $400 on a bottle and it’s somehow going to be tainted and then they just have to pour it down the drain.”  Check out Taber’s full interview to learn more.

So I’ll just continue to be surprised every time I remove the foil from a bottle neck to see which type of closure awaits me.  And after all, it’s just a means to an end, right?