Zork launches resealable sparkling closure
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A bottle of sparkling wine will retain its fizz for several days after opening with a new resealable closure.
Closure company Zork has launched the product in Australia and New Zealand, with three major companies including Constellation interested in the product.
Constellation Wines Australia has confirmed it is participating in trials.
‘Is our company’s position to continually undertake trials across our viticultural, winemaking and packaging areas,’ a spokesman said. ‘At this stage, our Zork trials are not complete and there will be no change to our sparkling wine cork closures.’
The bottle pops like a traditional closure when opened. The polyethylene cap is then pushed back on to the bottle to retain the wine’s sparkle and freshness.
Initial tests by the Australian Wine and Research Institute show it can prolong the life of a sparkling wine after opening and ‘can provide equivalent or superior performance to traditional cork’.
Zork CEO Dave Pahl told decanter.com, ‘We have three major multinational drinks companies interested in the product. They have been doing technical trials for the past 12 months.’
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Within 10 years, it aims to have a 10% share of the 2bn sparkling closure market.
The company plans to launch in Europe within six months and hopes to have three manufacturing plants on the continent in three years’ time.
Written by Rebecca Gibb
Rebecca Gibb MW is a wine journalist and editor who has also founded Bamboozled games, ‘the world’s first wine and spirit puzzle makers’. Having spent six years living in New Zealand, she has recently returned to her native north-east England. While in New Zealand, she became a Master of Wine, graduating top of her class and winning the Madame Bollinger medal for excellence in tasting. A former winner of both the UK’s young wine writer of the year and the Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer, her first book The Wines of New Zealand was published in 2018. She also runs wine events and has her own consultancy business The Drinks Project. She was a judge at the 2019 Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA).