Archive for the 'Closures' Category

What type of wine package does the least damage to the environment? The answer to the question is not quite as simple as you might think.

It seems obvious that glass bottles with cork closures and tin capsules would be the right thing to buy on Earth Day, since all these items are recyclable. But it may be that wine in the clunky but inexpensive bag-in-box format goes lighter on the earth.

Greenness and light carbon footprints are hot topics in the wine industry right now, as wineries, regions and the competing packaging companies shoot almost daily press releases touting their green credentials. It’s a hot topic in a lot of other industries, too, according to this USA Today article.

But with everybody patting themselves on the back there may be a whiplash effect when the issues get better sorted out. First of all, glass is heavy, and packaging wine in glass makes it a very heavy thing to transport as Tyler Colman of the Dr. Vino blog and others have examined very closely.

The heavier an item is, the more ship, train and truck fuel it requires to move it from the winery to you. That makes its carbon footprint heavier, which is bad for the atmosphere and contributes to climate change, most experts on the subject say.

Especially unfriendly are the trendy, super-heavy wine bottles that seem to weigh as much empty as they do full. These are beautiful and artistic, but any winery that sticks with this packaging is going to have some explaining to do to the public.

There is no compelling practical reason for these babies other than their heft in a consumer’s hands. Wineries can get the same protection from light and the same aging potential from a much lighter bottle.

Boxed wines count very little of their weight from the package, so liter by liter, they win the contest for the least spewing of gas and diesel fumes per mile to market.

The cork companies have seized on the green credentials of their products, pointing out how many trees and animals are saved and how much carbon is turned to oxygen by preserving and using the cork oak forests in Portugal and Spain.

The key point here is that you don’t have to cut a cork tree down to harvest the cork. Workers strip a layer of cork off the tree about once every nine years, and the layer grows back with no other damage to the tree. That’s about as renewable as it gets. Of course they do have to ship them halfway around the world to wineries in California and Australia, which must burn a lot of diesel.

Makers of other bottle closures like screw tops and synthetic corks, however, argue that their products can be manufactured closer to the wineries, using comparatively few raw materials, little energy and are recyclable, too.

Some wineries are starting to package their wines in plastic bottles like soda. I love San Pellegrino in plastic because it’s so lightweight and unbreakable, so it won’t put me off to see wine in plastic bottles. By the way, what’s more absurd than sending water around the world in heavy glass bottles? Wine is absolutely eco-responsible compared to that.

The greenest wine packaging of all is probably the refillable jug or carboy. If you’re lucky enough to live near wineries (and everyone does now because wineries operate in all 50 states, about 5,000 of them total in the US) and one of them lets you bring your own container and fill it up, then you are in a very green place. (Or at the very least you can be a wine locavore and drink the local juice.)

I believe that in California The Hess Collection Winery in Napa and Preston Vineyards in Sonoma County have offered this opportunity from time to time. Who else lets you bring your own jug?

When was the last time you had a truly bad bottle of wine? Not one that you just didn’t like, but one that stank?

“Corked” bottles are the most common today, and bottles that taste “corked” but really went bad for other reasons. It used to be common to open a funky-smelling or stale wine, or a fizzy wine that wasn’t supposed to be sparkling.

Thank god and the world’s winemaking universities that we don’t have to put up with many truly flawed, terrible wines anymore. But it does still happen. In the last few weeks I’ve had a very barnyardy Chambourcin and an otherwise nice Chardonnay that seemed to have a veneer of burnt rubber.

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Have you ever caught yourself doing something wrong, something you always say you don’t do? Worse yet, has someone else caught you doing something you’ve told them you don’t do? And just to add another layer of complexity, has that person catching you ever been from Bowling Green, Ohio?

The deed was done on a recent trip to Cleveland for a wedding. I was sitting at a sidewalk table outside a great Italian cafe called La Dolce Vita in the Little Italy section of the city with a few friends from my college era. The sky was blue, the temperature was a perfect 73, the humidity was low and I was choosing the wine because they had figured out that I make a living writing about it, while they manage hospitals, raise money for music schools, volunteer as EMTs, diagnose sultans with various infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic, and so on.

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A comment on my last post, about how sommeliers may be more sympathetic to people sending bottles back, points out how complex the issue of flawed bottles is, and how worked up over it people are. Poster Shane Colella doesn’t hesitate to send back any bottle that is less than perfect, the same way one rejects a dish that’s not cooked perfectly.

Right on–the consumer has to stand up for his rights.

Shane concludes by saying, “I just can’t wait until the big boys in the wine world fully migrate to screwtops so we can all just get on with drinking the good stuff instead of running back to the cellar for another questionable bottle.”

I have a couple of problems with that.

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Has the tide finally turned on sending bottles back? Is it just me, or have sommeliers and waiters gotten better with this?

I dislike having to do it, but when I smell the musty, newspapers-in-the-damp-basement aroma of trichloroanisole in a wine, I still have to do it. I tell the waiter I think the wine is corky, she smells it and then there’s a moment when I don’t know if she’s going to believe me.

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Just when you think the world is becoming more enlightened about the stopper on your wine bottle, something happens to show how hard and how long the struggle will be to get over corks. Recently I met a nice couple in the publishing business, apparently affluent, apparently sophisticated, apparently in their late 50s, but he at least was apparently a cork snob.

We were discussing barrels, oak alternatives (chips), winemaking techniques, grape growing practices, and marketing topics including corks, synthetics and screwcaps, products that they call closures in industry jargon.

Screwcaps have come a long way from the cream sherry days, I told him, and they’re working great on not only New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and California rose, but on hiqh-quality, expensive red wines, too. He reacted like I’d just brought Nancy Pelosi into the steam room at the Bohemian Club (although I’m not sure they have one).

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