Are Screw Wines Poor Quality?

Screw caps on wine bottles are made of aluminum and roll out of a bottleneck. It has two components: an aluminum lid and a very thin, synthetic foil on the inside. In this way, the wine in the bottle does not come into contact with the aluminum.

This foil acts as a barrier for gas exchange and prevents a wine from coming into contact with oxygen from the outside. In order for a screw cap red wine to still mature in the bottle, wine growers control the oxygen content in the wine during bottling and the amount of oxygen between the liquid and the underside of the cap.

These are the disadvantages of screw caps.

Wines vinified in the absence of oxygen can take on a so-called reducing character and require some bottle development with the help of supplemental oxygen to unleash their full flavor richness. Airtight screw caps are not suitable for such wines. Aluminum production also has a negative impact on the environment, as it leaves around 70 million tons of waste each year.

Screw caps also have advantages

First of all, screw caps have been established as safe closing technology for over 30 years. The risk of spigot flavors caused by faulty corks is eliminated and is as easy as opening a wine bottle. no corkscrew necessary. Storing a wine bottle is also simplified: unlike cork wines, screw cap wines can be stored upright because the caps will not fall apart or dry out without coming into contact with the liquid.

Screw caps also have advantages for vineyards. On the one hand, there is a price of about 30 centimeters per cap, which is much cheaper than, for example, natural cork. Many supermarket chains now insist on using screw caps for most of their wines, as this allows for optimizing the production costs of the wines. In addition, more and more consumers do not consider screw cap wines to be of inferior or different quality to cork cap wines.

Therefore, it is wrong to automatically regard screw cap wines as poor quality. In some wine countries, such as New Zealand or Australia, even the rarest and most expensive wines are screw capped. Traditional wine countries like France and Italy still mostly use cork for their higher-end wines, but these countries also have great screw cap wines.

Source : Blick