Cullen: cork goes against green principles

last night opened a bottle of 1962 chateau la tour du pin figeac - it had a green moldy cork - not sure it is even good for cooking...what a waste! the austrians made several wines w. glass corks!

I disagree with her green-reasoning but I agree with her backing of the better quality control of alternative closures.

There was a period of years not too long ago where Australia and NZ were regularly written off and provided with the poorer quality corks from the manufacturers. Consequently the manufacturers have only themselves to thank for inspiring a movement against cork in Oceania. We were only going to sit around and be dudded for so long before we investigated locally available quality-controlled alternatives. It took a while for them to realise the market was slipping through their fingers and had to smarten up their act - by that time the train had already left the platform.

The amount of aluminum in a Stelvin is probably less than a tenth of that found in an empty beer/soda pop can, which also has a plastic liner/barrier to prevent contact with the liquid. Why not go after those who help create billions upon billions of those cans annually, w/only a small fraction of recycled?

So far, I've had at least 30 bottles of a favorite (go to)'05 wine (under screw cap) $28/us in the past two years with each one almost identical in its flavour profile to the first. How many of you can say that about your "corked" wine?

Was Dr. Chris Exley's "doctorate" granted in the field of Existential Phrenology or is he simply suffering from advanced onset Alzheimer's? And wine is not a truly living thing regardless of whatever "terroir" slipped into the bottle but an ever-changing complex chemical reaction subject to what went in at bottling and all the "terroir" surrounding it from that point on. Me thinks too many Decanter readers have a closet fetish for the smell of old women's shoes or worse.

Grapes are fruit, wine is fermented fruit juice. If you manipulate it enough you get bad cognac or worse. Has anyone out there revisited the tenants of scientific method recently or do you get off talking out of your arses?

"Her final argument is that the use of natural cork is anti-green, because all the energy used to make the wine – ‘all all the things which contribute to our carbon footprint’ – is lost to cork taint."

I disagree. The energy/carbon footprint is already there by the time the wine is bottled. You can break the bottle as it comes off the production line or drink it after 10 years - it makes no difference as those are sunk costs. In fact breaking it immediately after bottling would be better for the environment as then the incremental carbon costs of transport, storage etc. would not be incurred.

Being in the wine trade and having hosted many masterclasses of old and new world wines of many ages where multiple bottles of the same wine are opened I can assure you that the bottle variation under cork is scandalous with random oxidation more of an issue though less easy to detect than obvious tca - it is this insidious aspect of cork that makes it such an inferior closure. Screw-cap by comparison consistently operates like the all too rare decent cork.

Why are people so hung up on cork? In prett much every other area of winemaking globally winemakers have adopted new and mostly better technology including Bordeaux and Burgundy

Agreed. Decanter's editorial staff obviously don't know anything about weighing up the sustainability options/life-cycles analysis of materials used in the wine industry. Shame. Educate yourselves. And Vanya Cullen? Is this the lady I have heard so much about ? disappointing..........

As a wine producer using Stelvin I declare my preference.

There are several service clubs (Rotary, Lions) here in NZ collecting used stelvins and recycling them for children's kidney dialysis! Stelvin need not be seen to be so anti-green if the aluminium is recyclable....!

Vanya seems to have a cork issue. Instead she should just learn how to use it. I've been tasting very old cork-closed wines in France for a decade and have only had one or two disappointments due to taint. A lot of the problem would come down to the quality of the cork shipped to Oz a while back. It may also be due to our (I'm originally from Adelaide) "get on with it" impatience and our inexperience in handling fragile products. Organics and Biodynamics are not techniques; when conducted correctly, they reflect a person's approach to life, and involve listening to traditions that precede the moment when wine became a mere product.

I agree that perhaps the wine's ability to age is open to question here. There was a fairly recent tasting of over 30 vintages of Eyrie Vineyard Chardonnay from Oregon - not exactly known for age-worthy Chard, especilly not the clones they used in those days - all under cork, and the majority of them were in unbelievably good nick by all accounts. The point has been made: be confident in your chosen closure and buy good quality corks if that is your choice. If you want to make a difference to the environment then use lighter bottles, turn your TV off properly before you go bed and don't fill the kettle all the way when you make your tea!

Utter rubbish. Decanter should not give a podium for this kind of drivel. It's a shame that people will listen to her and view her as an expert which she clearly is not.

I thought there would have been some intelligence and facts in her argument. I actually feel embarrassed for her as she comes out rather simple. I am actually surprised that Decanter allowed something so badly written and argued be printed in there magazine.

Really terrible and basic from Decanter & Ms.Cullen.

There are simply too many points she makes that are absolute rubbish. It's a shame that Decanter would print her statements without commenting. How many readers took her statements as the opinion of someone who knows what they are talkiing about. Ms. Cullen needs to go back to school.

I suggest she uses a better cork!!! What about that totally unique environment that a cork forest provides? flora and fauna that can only be found in these areas would be lost forever, if the renewable source of closure was abandoned? Think about the broader picture?

A provocative argument introducing green issues in a rather lateral manner. However for me it is not persuasive enough to convince.

Cork taint will always be a possibilty, but it's the risk everyone is aware going into winemaking or even buying wine. There are always risks but we should not exile traditional wine making because of risks. It's the beauty and excitment when you open an 1983 Jordan to see that it still holds strong or if it has just run it's course like everything in the world does.

Screw Cap make people lazy on consumers and producers. Because this is the best remedy against cork taint and you don't need to use a bottle opener, Screw cap win! I say wrong. A good cork it's like a good wine you need to find the right one for your right wine. People these days are looking after their money and not what wine is really about.
I will always admire a producer who 's looking after its wine included a good cork.
regards.

I was fortunate to attend the Liberty tasting in Edinburgh and heard Ms Cullen talk through her lovely wines, but if some particular vintages of her wine were still good and yet others were not, doesn't that indicate that it isn't cork that is causing the problem and could be the wines ability to age that should be called into question?

If she stands by this view that renewable and recyclable packaging is not the best way to be green, I look forward to seeing Cullen Chardonnay 2011 in Tetra Pak, as they keep the wine as fresh as a daisy with no taint, and have less environmental impact when it comes to shipping as they are lighter and more compact than big, chunky (recyclable) bottles.

Her argument is quite logical, but I found it poor. Does the carbon footprint is 'smaller' in Europe? The Portuguese cork producers do not have to ship the cork 15000 kms to Australia!!! Wine is alive and needs to breath and live through the cork.

Charlie. That old chest-nut -that wine under screw-cap doesn't age.

There is now an overwhelming body of evidence to convince those who would listen that wines under screw-cap do in fact age. In fact they age at the same rate as the best examples of cork(a small number since random oxidation and cork taint is all to common). Real science now tells us that it is not oxygen passing through cork that allows wine to age, rather the oxygen (at bottling) in the head-space.

But I don't need science to convince me of this fact since I have now tasted enough examples of magnificentally and consistently aged wine under screw-cap to convince me of this superior closure - the proof is in the pudding as they say. Only last week I was fortunate enough to taste a beautifully aged bottle of 1980 Pewsey Vale Eden Valley Riesling bottled under screw-cap. Not even rated as one of the classic vintages, just a fantastic example of 30yo aged Riesling.

Why are people so hung up on cork? We got over goat-skins for wine storage.

As a restaurateur I serve wines with both stoppers. Any faulty wines under cork I offer the client a "nose" and if they wish a taste. The vast majority then understand the problem. Tales of woe follow as they tell me they have drunk these wines under sufference!So both problem and ignorance STILL exists.Now, little or no feelings towards screw cap just like corks in the past.

Buy corks from respectable producers with integrity and a garantee of no more than.1%to.5% incidence. You will never have to complain.
I recommend PARAMON EXPORTAP for your very good wines.
If your incidence is above .5%, you are taken for a ride...

There is so much more waste going on in virtually every aspect of our lives, that the argument that screwcap is a wasteful closure is laughable. Quite simply, if there was any other aspect of our lives that incorporated a component with a 4-5% failure rate, we'd be up in arms. The business offering the product would lose it's customers. There is no genuine argument for cork except for tradition, and I have seen and tasted enough wine to know that wine ages/matures/changes very well 10yrs+ under screwcap whilst retaining freshness and structure. At least 99% of the worlds wine should be under screwcap.

The cork debate is already over. Let the French relish in their AOC regulations until we can trounce them like we did at Agincourt. Stelvin is the modern day longbow archer and a weapon against tyranny!!

Just about a year back I had opened a bottle of Corton Charlemagne by Louis Latour and enjoyed it thoroughly due
to the fact it had matured nicely.Ms Cullen might like her Chards young,but I would like mine well matured!

Does Vanya Cullen want to know how much aluminium there is in her Chardonnays aged under screw cap? Perhaps she doesn't care and enjoys the minerality that it brings to the wine?

Even if she does not care about the aluminium content of her wine she should know that no industry has wreaked more industrial havoc and produced more pollution than the aluminium industry.

Whatever her green arguments may be against cork those associated with the extraction of aluminium to make screw caps are orders of magnitude worse. Vanya Cullen's wines are world class her opinions on the green credentials of aluminium screw caps are simply uninformed.

Cullen make some great wines without a doubt & I have a few in my cellar. Over some 40 years of drinking wine almost daily I have been fortunate enough to have faced less than a dozen with cork taint.The main grumble I have with cork is that it crumbles when I open the annual bottle of 20 or more year old Grange. I can live with that. I do have a problem with an aluminum cap and plastic insert adding to landfill especially when it comes from a biodynamic & carbon neutral wine maker. Jasper Hill's Ron Laughton who is also a biodynamic producer of excellent wines swears by cork and told me he hasn't found it a problem as long as you source the best cork. More energy needs to be put into finding a better alternative such as a glass stopper as is being tested for Penfolds Grange. But a non biodegradable screwcap is not the answer with apologies to Vanya who is an excellent practitioner of the art.

Regardless of whether its antigreen or not corks ability to disappoint cannot be underestimated. Last night a treasured Magnum of 1999 Hermitage La Chappelle from Jaboulet was finally opened- and was corked. ARGH! Do you think either I or Mr Jaboulet could get our money back?

Ms Cullen's logic holds water only if the percentage of corks with taint is high enough to exceed the additional cost of the screwcap. Does the fact that cork is a renewable and sustainable resource count for anything?

I see a new study on the Decanter website saying barrels may also be a source of taint. Does Ms. Cullen now find barrels to be anti-green?

That is the lamest argument against cork I've ever heard.
I guess being biodynamic Cullen had to come up with something to justify their position.
Making an individual choice of closure for your wine is fine either way, people should be secure enough in their choice to leave others to theirs.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
Let's not forget cork keeps a huge area of semi-arid land under permanent forest, is fully recyclable and has a much smaller carbon footprint.
Finding top quality cork is an important task (-very difficult in Australia) but it's shallow to dismiss a closure that has a track record of thousands of years.
A balanced view would be that there are certainly bad corks out there(Quality Control and Sourcing can mitigate this) but cork as a closure is perfectly effective.
Screwcap has it's own issues that can also negatively impact wine quality (in some cases whole batches!).
This wonderful living thing that is wine can be affected by either closure.
The religious verve of screwcap advocates does get a bit old.
Let's get past the closure and judge the wine in the glass!

- On behalf of all the lovely old bottles of wine I've enjoyed over the years.

Love Cullen Chard. Don't get this argument. How long does she want her Chard to last? Forever with no change?

Is this the new paradigm of aging? A perfectly aged wine is one that does not change because it is in an inert container. Let's all turn our cellars down to 42 degrees F. if that is the case.