Australian wine company Penfolds will re-focus on cork closures and investigate glass closures as an alternative to screwcaps into the future.
Penfolds' chief winemaker Peter Gago said he believed screwcaps were not the best option for its closures, especially those made for higher-end wines.
The winery first began using screwcaps in the late 1990s, and all its white wines have been sealed with screwcaps since 2004.
Its red wines are sealed with a mixture of cork, synthetic cork and screwcaps.
In 2012, Penfolds decided to allow its customers to choose between cork or screwcaps for several of its high-end wines, and at the time Gago explained to The Sydney Morning Herald that “cork is a barometer of care. It’s a better indicator of bad handling, heat damage or poor storage conditions, because the cork will leak or, if affected by heat, slightly push up into the seal.”
Speaking at Penfolds’ re-corking clinic in London in late September this year, Gago reinforced this idea.
“Screwcaps are not the future,” he said at the clinic.
His main concern with screwcaps continues to be heat damage, since there is no way of telling if a screwcap-sealed wine has been exposed to excessive heat.
Another factor underpinning the company’s reinforced interest in cork, especially for higher-end wines, is that the TCA problem has been “partially solved”.
Gago stated that examples of TCA in cork were now down to around one per cent – comparable to the percentage of screwcap-sealed wines that suffer from oxidation due to mechanical damage of the stoppers.
The majority of Penfolds’ top-end red wines, including its revered Grange red wine, are 100 per cent cork-sealed.
In the early 2000s the winery experimented with screwcaps for its red wines but reached the conclusion that cork was the better option.
For its white wines, the winery now aims to move away from screwcaps, and will either choose cork stoppers or experiment with glass closures, a possibility that it's currently investigating.
