Decanter World Wine AwardsNomacorc releases new closure
- Monday 23 May 2011
The synthetic stopper manufacturer, which produces 2.1bn closures annually, representing about 12% of the 18bn still wine closure market, claims its extruded plastic closures now offer perfect ‘oxygen management’.
‘Four years ago we started a research programme to understand how oxygen ingress through the closure affected the development of wine in the bottle,’ Malcolm Thompson, global vice president of marketing and innovation told Decanter.com.
Nomacorc’s research partners include the Geisenheim Intitute, University of California Davis, the Australian Wine Research Institute, the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique at Montpellier (INRA), and the Centro de Aromas of the Catholic University of Chile.
Research programmes include the effect of oxygen on development of Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc and other grape varieties.
‘We now have sufficient data to go forward with our vision to introduce a line of closures that allow wines to develop exactly as the winemaker intended,' Thompson said.
The Select Series 300, Nomacorc claims, allows oxygen ingress of 0.002cc of oxygen per day to enter the bottle. The Select 700 and 500 are more porous, allowing 0.0042cc and 0.003cc of oxygen into the bottle.
Nomacorc stresses that its closures don’t ‘mimic’ natural cork, ‘because natural cork is inconsistent,’ Thompson says.
By contrast, Nomacorc can control wine development through oxygen management with a great degree of exactitude, Thompon said.
‘We can determine which closure will allow the right level of development by type of wine, by varietal, by region, phenolic ripeness, barrel age, whether the wine is aged on lees or not and many other factors.’
He added, ‘First and foremost our objective is to educate the market on the importance of oxygen management.’
The Select Series is priced ‘competitively’ with natural cork, Nomacorc says.
Have your say!
wirth
June 09 10:47
Mr Schulman, This is not completely reduced state or oxidized one : obviously if you want reduced attributes, the scewcaps are the best but if you choose with accuracy between the different Nomacorc stoppers you can deliver the good amount of oxygen into a wine during the storage : following the initial type of wine that you have, you have to choose the stopper, the storage temperature and time of ageing : this is oxygen management, this is futur.
Regards.
Doug Schulman
June 03 03:15
I think Mr/Ms? Wirth is pointing out the obvious: wines sealed with dependable, low or virtually no transmission closures require less sulfur. I don't see the incidence of reductive characteristics as evidence of anything else. To say it is seems to be false logic to me. I guess I fall into what I could now call the "Casey camp" of common sense, unadulterated by the motives of marketing. I have to agree that well designed and well made screwcaps seem like a much better alternative to natural cork than any synthetic stopper.
John Casey
May 29 08:07
Briefly, any ingress of oxygen into bottled wine sets off a game of ‘pass the electrons’ and the composition of the wine is altered. Although some may see these changes as “development” or “complexity”, they are in my view fundamentally undesirable and a prelude to eventual deterioration of the wine, (based on 4-5 decades of direct experience of these matters). The comment of course does not apply to the ‘vins jaunes’ of the Jura or to sherry style wines in which a degree of overt oxidation is part of the style.
Instrumental measurements of the OTR of corks have no relevance to the performance of corks as barriers to atmospheric oxygen. This is because the partial pressure of oxygen in a cork compressed in the neck of a bottle is about double that in the atmosphere. Corks form a pneumatic seal and bleeding the oxygen out to obtain a stable concentration gradient for OTR measurement is like deflating tyres before road-testing them.
Wirth
May 27 08:55
Mr Casey,
your lack of knowledge is obvious and you seems to refuse the progress.
I am a scientist who works in the INRA of Montpelier in France on the analyses of color, polyphenols and the sensory analysis in Véronique Cheynier's team. For 3 years we worked in collaboration with Nomacorc to study the evolution of various Grenache wines with stoppers of increasing OTR.
After several months of ageing, we observed that OTR took over the initial winemaning effects. For instance wines bottled with higher OTR appeared more fruity and floral, with higher color intensity and yellow-orange tint and a higher amount of derived pigments. In opposition, le the lower OTR wines appeared more animal and veggy (reduced)and with higher residual sulfites content. This is not fiction, this is science ! Because of the homogeneity of its strucure and porosity, the Nomacorc stopper allows a regular, linear transfer of oxygen into wine. Also,the management of oxygen, which is the key of wine evolution, is possible by using this kind of stopper. Please read some of our papers : Caille et al., 2010, Analytica Chimica Acta (660); Wirth et al., 2010, Food Chemistry (123). Please, read the scientific studies before judging without knowing.