WINE IS NO longer the domain of the bourgeois middle class. It's a massive global industry and for some, particularly collectors of rare fine wines, it's big business. But cork taint - the undesirable smells or tastes that can be detected in a bottle only after it's been opened - is literally spoiling the industry, and has spawned a multimillion-dollar 'alternative closures' sector. Metal screw-caps - long associated with only the cheapest of wines - is leading the pack, but in the past couple of years a sleeker contender has emerged: the glass stopper.
Since cork taint - or, more technically, the chemical compound trichloroanisole (TCA) - was linked to corks in the 1980s, a raft of plastic and metal stoppers has hit the market. There are gimmicky products such as Zork, a plastic-looking capsule that gives almost the same 'pop' as a cork, and the more utilitarian screw-caps, synthetic corks and crown caps, the small metal caps used on beer bottles. Broadly, they all offer the same thing: an alternative to cork and the promise of a lower incidence of cork taint; the mouldy, hessian-sack smell that's estimated to affect about 3-5 per cent of all bottles sealed with cork.
What's interesting about glass stoppers is how quickly wine producers are adopting them. After just two years in production, an estimated 14 million are being used by 600 European wineries. The stoppers are also being taken up in New World markets such as Australia and the US. Alcoa, a German-based US company that makes and sells the stoppers, attributes the popularity to a reduction in cork taint.
'This is the first alternative to high-quality cork - it's a big breakthrough,' says Alcoa's business development manager, Thomas Strieder. 'The trend to screw-caps is unstoppable, so alternative wine closures are in and consumers' acceptance is growing rapidly.'
Alcoa, which also produces screw-caps, expects its stopper sales to almost double again next year to 24 million. Strieder estimates that by 2010, there will be four billion alternative closures (screw-caps or glass stoppers) on the market.
Piggy-backing on the success of the screw-cap is a clever strategy. It's taken decades for wineries to convince themselves and consumers that an alternative closure can deliver a more consistent product. The push for screw-caps was driven by Australian and New Zealand wineries, which were often supplied with inferior cork. Now, according to the New Zealand Screw-cap Initiative, 80 per cent of all wine bottled in New Zealand is under screw-cap.