Winemakers Pop Their Corks For A Colourful Plastic Look-alike
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday April 2, 1997
They said it would never happen, but it has. Plastic is replacing natural cork in wine bottles.
Insert your corkscrew into a bottle of Pepper Tree, Tamburlaine, Saddlers Creek or Hardy's Hunter Ridge and give a pull, and you're likely to find a cylinder of plastic, shaped and looking like a normal cork but possibly black, white, yellow or even purple.
It's made of a polypropylene compound, the same material as artificial heart valves and bicycle helmets, and it has the potential to overtake cork as the preferred wine-bottle seal.
Why? It's not cheaper - in fact it's more expensive than the cheapest grades of cork used in wines selling for less than $10. The reason is cork taint: 2,4,6 trichloroanisole (TCA) to be precise. The wine industry estimates that 2 to 6 per cent of wines sold are affected to varying degrees by TCA and other cork taints.
But most consumers don't know cork taint when they smell it. They just know the wine tastes "off" and when they come across a "corked" bottle they mistakenly blame the winemaker.
There are several synthetic corks being tried out by Australian wine companies, but the only one being used commercially so far is an American product, Supreme Corq.
These look and feel so similar to real cork that many people are unaware they are plastic. They are being used mainly in white, medium to lower-priced premium wines, intended for immediate drinking. It will be a while before winemakers trust synthetics in top-line reds with long-term cellaring potential.
More than 100 American wineries have either tested or issued commercial wines sealed by Supreme Corq. BRL Hardy has just launched its new range of $11 Hunter Ridge wines with synthetic corks in blue, green and tan. And Southcorp has switched its entire Lindemans Cawarra range to Supreme Corq, shipping thousands of cases to English supermarket chains, whose wine buyers are passionately committed to swapping the traditional corks.
Several winemakers have tried synthetic corks and found they keep the wine fresher than conventional corks. And there's a bonus of not having to store the wine horizontally to keep the cork moist.
Mr David Morgan of Classic Packaging, which imports Supreme Corq, said he expected his sales to increase by 100 per cent in the next three months as a number of winery trials were completed.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
