Is UC Davis a sufficiently impartial source for you? Their Enology program is considered to be one of the best in the world (and has done much to advance the science of making wine, albeit sometimes leading to loss of terroir and soul-less chardonnays in California). Sometimes science can be a force for evil as well as for good ... still they've evaluated many aspects of screwcaps and found it to be superior by every criterion, for better wines. Their research finds that badly made wines benefit from being under cork instead of a screwcap, as some of the faults in the wine, such as excess SO2, will burn off over time under cork and not in a screwcap. So, bad wine makers prefer cork, while good wine makers use screwcap. I've recently paid over USD 500 for a single bottle of wine, with screwcap; so it really exists in the high end, with some of the finest wines in the world. But I do agree that snobbery in the wine world colours it considerably. See http://wineserver.ucdavis.edu/pdf/at...nd%20CS%20.pdf