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| Pendock Unfiltered - Cork Catastrophe |
| 28 April 2006 by Neil Pendock |
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| Commenting on the Swiss International Air Lines Wine Awards results in 2004, chairman of judges Robert Joseph made the point ‘corked wines ran somewhere between 7 and 8% of entries, a scandalously high rejection rate.’ Two years later and we’re up to 15% cork taint on Sauvignon Blanc and a new sound bite from Joseph: ‘SA has the worst corks in the world.’
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At the Tides restaurant in Camps Bay following the first day’s judging, of ten whites selected for dinner, no fewer than three were corked.
SA wine is in the midst of a cork catastrophe, borne out by export numbers to the UK. In 2004, SA exported 107m litres of wine to Blighty. Last year, that number fell 5% to 102m litres, in spite of climbing UK wine consumption. New Zealand sales were up over 40% over the same period. Could this have anything to do with the fact that only 15% of Kiwi wine is closed with natural cork while in SA, natural cork rules?
Considering the 9% decline in bottled wine exports to the UK (from 88m litres in 2004 to 78m litres last year), it certainly looks like UK importers have no confidence in SA bottled wine. Either that, or producers have twigged it is cheaper to ship your wine in bulk and bottle it (with a screw cap) in Europe.
Given that many of the top SA brands in the UK are closed with screw caps (think Bruce Jack’s Flagstone range, Charles Back’s Goats do something-or-other and of course, Kumala) SA cork-closed bottles are to fine wine what the Hindenburg dirigible is to air travel: romantic and quaint but potentially catastrophic.
On the international scene, producers are switching from cork to screw caps, glass stoppers and artificial cork in droves. Domaine des Baumard, one of three Loire producers to be included in Robert Parker’s World’s Greatest Wine Estates, is moving its entire production to screw cap. Ditto divers Châteaux in Bordeaux: Couhins Lurton, La Louvière and Château Bonnet plus a big name from Portugal, Miguel Champalimaud, who had a novel take on the problem: ‘today, cork is more expensive than a litre of wine. We have become cork salesmen instead of wine sellers’ as he told Reuters.
In SA, support for cork comes from unlikely quarters. At the party to celebrate Vergelegen as the Wine Enthusiast magazine’s choice for best winery in the New World, winemaker André van Rensburg told Beeld that his Sauvignon Blanc – the first ultra-premium SA wine closed with a screw cap – is back under cork as locals refuse to accept screw caps. Seems that some (un-named) restaurants return wine shipped under screw cap, and as Van Rensburg notes ‘SA consumers would rather drink badly corked wine than accept screw caps.’ Which may very well be true. However, this is clearly not the case in export markets or in wine competitions. Which leaves the SA producer between a rock and a hard place. Perhaps dual bottlings is the solution: corks for SA and Belgium and screw caps for the rest of the world.
On the subject of best New World wineries, Randall Grahm’s Boony Doon must be up there. In stark contrast to Van Rensburg, Grahm has a declared mission of the total eradication of cork as a wine closure. His latest wheeze is a recall of corkscrews in exchange for ‘an unspeakably cool T-shirt.’ Apart from the usual complaint of TCA contamination playing Russian Roulette with a wine, Grahm has a few Californian objections of his own: corkscrews are ‘primitive, phallocentric symbols of male aggression’ and ‘the very silly macho Italian pastime of comparative cork length competition will also cease forever. Concavity will reign supreme and a soft, vaguely pastel, feminine glowing aura will cover the world, leading to continuing millennia of world peace and amity between all men.’
Also see Top Portuguese wine producer switches to caps
Return of a show-stopper by Jilly Goolden
Should the cork be saved? by Michael Dresser, The Baltimore Sun
It strikes me... by Jeanine Wardman
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