Screw plugs have advantages over oak plugs.
On June 16, 2008, Decanter, a famous British wine magazine, officially declared on its website that corks are the best choice for wine corks, and claimed that in its August 2008 magazine, several influential wine critics would give 50 reasons for falling in love with corks. Once the news was published on the Internet, it triggered discussions among many enthusiastic drinkers, with mixed comments, while the voice of crusade from environmentalists thought it was too early to draw this conclusion without sufficient evidence.
Pinocchio magazine invited many authors and wine critics who have been writing for it to participate in this wine tasting, including Joanna Simon and steven spurrier from The Sunday Times, wine critics, Linda Murphy from California, Huon Hooke and Christelle Guibert from Australia, and restaurant critic Brian St. Pierre. Every expert who participated in wine tasting listed his favorite bottle opener wine, all of which were white wine without exception. In terms of aged red wine, they don't think that screw stopper is better than oak stopper.
Why the leather oak plug?
Which is better, a screw plug or an oak plug? Before answering this question that has caused widespread controversy in the world, let's clarify a question-why is there such controversy?
In the 1960s, "cork" wine often appeared in bottles sealed with oak stoppers. This wine smells like oak stopper, but it has no fruit fragrance at all. It is basically dead wine. In 1980s, this problem became more and more serious. It's luck to meet cork. If you are in a restaurant, you can ask the sommelier to change a new bottle for you. In fact, the sommelier has to taste a bottle of wine before opening the wine for the guests, so the probability of this happening is very small, provided that the sommelier is professional enough. Some wines are sobered up in the decanter for half an hour to an hour, and the taste is gone. I bought it myself and found that I could only eat dumb losses. The rate of bad sauce is generally 3% to 6%, and every winery is unwilling to face this fact. Imagine what kind of disaster Toyota will have with the same damage rate.
The reasons for bad plugs are complicated. First, before bottling, the oak stopper itself has defects invisible to the naked eye. After waiting for Chen Fang for decades, a small defect can kill wine, which will give off an unpleasant musty smell. Secondly, the influence of environment on oak stopper. Wine is alive and fragile, which requires extremely high temperature and humidity. With the change of air temperature, humidity and humidity, natural oak plugs will shrink or become larger. Dry air is the natural enemy of cork, which makes oak cork dehydrate, dry and shrink, and then air takes the opportunity to enter, which makes wine deteriorate.
The problem is that once the winery sells the wine, it loses control of it and cannot know the exact rate of bad jam. Consumers and wine distributors often suffer the loss of broken corks. Of course, the oak stopper manufacturing company is also under pressure, so it has to adopt more and more advanced technology to reduce the bad stopper rate and carry out deeper cleaning on the oak stopper before it leaves the factory. Breweries in new world countries raised objections. Will the use of this chemical pollute the wine?
Player's revelation
However, some experienced wine collectors believe that, to some extent, bad wine is one of the pleasures of drinking. It's like gambling, especially in rare years of private transactions. You must know what kind of state this treasure is, whether it is a young man, a mature man, an old man or a corpse. Risk is just a weight to increase the excitement of the game.
Throw the question to the screw plug.
New world wine practitioners, such as Australia and New Zealand, did not have the conservatism and rules of traditional old world wine-making countries from the beginning. They want to change the status quo and start trying new corks. In the 1970s, some wineries in Australia began to use bottle openers, but consumers were not ready to accept it, and soon the bottle openers withdrew from the market. Today, in Australia and New Zealand, almost 70% wineries have begun to use screw plugs, and consumers have realized that it can effectively avoid bad plugs, and the fruit aroma is rich and fresh, which shows that the strong sealing of screw plugs can not only prevent air from entering, but also prevent fruit aroma from flowing out. However, people found that the corkscrew also has its own problems, that is, the wine sealed with it must be drunk within three to five years, and there will be a very unpleasant stench after a long time. How is this stench caused? It turns out that sulfide will be produced during the fermentation of wine. Because the oak stopper can let in a small amount of air and neutralize it with mercaptan, you can't smell sulfide after opening the bottle. The screw plug is completely isolated from the air, and if the sulfide is not neutralized, a reduction reaction will occur, resulting in foul smell. Therefore, in order to avoid such problems, some screw plug manufacturers are trying to develop breathing screw plugs, otherwise, if it takes decades for Chen Fang's Bordeaux red wine to reach the drinking stage, I am afraid it will still be impossible to say goodbye to oak plugs.
Everyone does things in his own way.
In addition to the above advantages and limitations, we find that the war between cork and oak cork is still controversial in many places, because it involves not only the interests of producers of oak cork and cork, but also wineries, consumers, dealers and so on. However, the research needed to solve these mysteries is far from enough, and few third-party research institutions are willing to invest in research funds. Therefore, oak cork and screw cork manufacturers and wineries cooperate with scientists to find evidence for their conclusions with their experimental results. Every once in a while, new conclusions will come out. There are even some unconfirmed opinions, which come out of the laboratory with dignity and cause an uproar in the world. Last year, for example, New Zealand wine writer Keith Stewart issued a new health warning to spiral wine drinkers. The author thinks that there is a connection between the wine sealed with bottle opener and the high incidence of breast cancer.
In short, compared with people's doubts, the research in the whole wine industry is still too thin and the evidence is insufficient. New World Winery, which is optimistic about bottle openers, is ready to occupy the bottle opener market first and apply bottle openers to most white wines and red wines that do not need to be aged. Some wineries that believe in it are desperate. For example, Wolf Blass, Australia's third largest wine export winery, uses bottle openers for all wines sold in Australia, including the top-end platinum wine. A considerable number of wineries are still waiting to see, pushing red wine that needs to be aged to high-quality oak stoppers. Die-hard conservatives are dismissive of screw plugs. On the other hand, conservatives have paid unremitting attention to screw plugs. In their view, first of all, no one can prove that the screw plug will not cause harm to human health; Secondly, the greenhouse gas emissions produced by manufacturing plugs are very unfriendly to the environment; In addition, long-term environmental protection leads to the reduction reaction of sulfide, resulting in foul smell. Therefore, it has been suggested that there is a way for more wineries to invest in this experiment and find out the substitute of cork as soon as possible. The key is the current sales system. In short, almost no winery can accurately tell the annual bad jam rate, because once this bottle of wine leaves the factory, it is no longer controlled by the winery. Therefore, the winery neither knows who the end consumer is, nor can it receive the returned bad wine. If the wine with cork can be returned to the winery, then the winery will find a way to deal with it.
Germany, actively seeking foreign aid
You may think, in today's advanced technology, why hang yourself from a tree? Are there really no other substitutes? Of course, for example, glass plugs are still quite popular in Germany. Its sealing degree is the same as that of screw plug, which is environmentally friendly, harmless to health, convenient to open, convenient to store after drinking and not limited by resources. But its problem is that the cost is relatively high, and the use of this glass stopper requires a special bottle type. Of course, it is not known whether it is equally difficult to avoid the reduction of sulfide when sealing red wine.
Some people even think that even oak stoppers can't make wine breathe, and wine doesn't communicate with the outside air during the ripening process.
Oak stopper, screw stopper, glass stopper, I'm afraid no one wants to be a sucker. So who will be the savior of wine? Without sufficient research, it takes courage to draw a conclusion now.
There are different opinions on what attributes are needed before "plug"