I understand your point, and I agree with you. However, in fairness, that price difference is not entirely due to the cork-vs-screwcap. The Sancerre is probably more expensive in part because of the appellation "Sancerre". The Attitude probably uses some grapes outside Sancerre, so it is "merely" a Loire wine. The public misperception that appellation, like cork closures, automatically means a better wine allows them to charge a higher price. But that's another issue, isn't it?:)

So you're okay only allowing yourself to purchase a small percentage of wine available on the market today? I can't imagine limiting myself in such a manner. You just can't get top quality Bordeaux, Burgundy or Rhone with a screwcap and you probably won't be able to anytime soon.

Mrs. jacknyoc and I had a wonderful chardonnay at a little place in Chardonnay this summer. cork, of course. we found it sold in a wine shop here in S. Cal...same bottle, year, etc...screw top. We thought it might be due to having to add nitrates for exporting...or perhaps whites travel better with screw tops...we weren't sure. thoughts?

What particularly ticks me off is when I expect cork and find plastic. I'd take a screwcap anyday over this. However, you don't know. Sometimes there's some "mid range" nothing fancy stuff that I don't care if I drink now or in a year, or the year after that if I forget about it. But I don't want stuff sitting with plastic. It seems most of this comes from Europe. Feh.

Many wineries now bottle the same wine with both cork and screw cap. It is due to market expectations, with some believing that a cork is needed for aging the wine ... despite plenty of evidence that most wine ages better with screw cap than with cork. The only benefit of cork is that it allows oxidation which can "burn off" flaws in the wine while screw cap aging is entirely reductive (as it should be). So the best made wines benefit from screw cap, while less well made wines benefit from cork.

Rather ironically screw cap machine for bottling is an expensive investment for a winery, and some of the finest wines are now in screw cap. Grant Burge was mentioned in this thread as using cork -- but the very best Grant Burge wines are exclusively in screw cap, to give the rest of the story and put it into proper perspective. Many restaurants still insist on cork, particularly for expensive bottlings; I suppose it is part of the show for the sommelier. For home use, most wines should be decanted, making the cork vs. screw show irrelevant. In fact decanter shape is more important for some wines :)

I'm happy to wait. I'm not the sort to spend a lot on wine (I would max out at ~30 GBP) and have found for that price point there is a lot available in screw cap - though not necessarily French. For the price point, Australian and New Zealand wines offer in my most humble peasant of opinions better quality compared to old world offerings.

Let me give you a tip. You turn the cork upside down, so the hole you made goes down, and it slips just fine and tight in the bottle. Never a problem or a difficulty.

I don't think that is true and if it is it is quite new. Mesach is one of the finest, if not the finest examples of Shiraz in Barossa. And it uses cork.

I think that comes down to a style preference. If you prefer Australian and New Zealand wines then you happen to be in luck since they use screwcaps a lot. Most Aussie wine is not in my wheelhouse however and I don't know much about the ageability of NZ wines.

So I continue to pull corks and it continues to not bother me.

I think we need to wait another 10 or 20 years before we have much evidence one way or another on this topic. Until then the jury is out...

Wine over 40 years old bottled in screw cap has been professionally tasted (and found superior to the cork equivalent). Do you really think 50 year old wine is needed before the jury can be in :) I personally own 1990 wine in screw cap (so that is 20 years old now) and am a convert though I confess to hating the thought of screw caps when I first saw them. Corks have theatre, but it is false snobbism and the technical advantage is too compelling for screw caps.

Almost all high-end wines in screw caps are also bottled in cork -- restaurants demand cork. Most distributors can't be bothered with stocking the same wine in 2 different closures. Most of the Grant Bruge in my cellar is in screw caps (in fact I had one last night with dinner, fwiw).

Which professional tasters are you talking about? I can point to the wine makers at Ridge as people who do not prefer screwcaps. I'd trust their palates over any critics I've ever met or read.

I buy quite a bit of aged wine on the secondary market and have yet to run into any with a screwcap. I'm not buying that there is much evidence out there. I'm dying to see a bottle of 1970 wine with a screwcap that isn't "fine burgundy" from California or MD 20/20...

Warning -- long append, to lay this discussion to rest (or at least get the facts established). Lots of other info is out there for those willing to Google it.

At last year's International Wine Challenge, the world's biggest competition, the panel of expert tasters found that nearly one in 20 - 4.9% - of the 11,033 corks pulled from bottles had spoiled or flattened the flavour of the wine they were supposed to protect.

Following this discovery, Wine International magazine, the organisers of the competition, held the world's first comparative tasting of wines sealed with natural corks, synthetic corks, screwcaps and even crown-caps similar to the one used for beer. The result was astonishing. Screwcaps were preferred in 21 out of 40 cases; corks only won once.

The Tasting
Nearly 50 wines from throughout the world were assembled in Bordeaux and set before 45 tasters, including leading authorities and winemakers, Michel Laroche of Chablis, Peter Gago of Penfolds, Jean-Marie Chadronnier of Dourthe in Bordeaux and Michel Rolland, the world's most famous wine consultant. The tasters were given examples of the same wines from different kinds of closure "blind" and asked to say which, if any, they preferred. In a few cases where no cork-sealed bottle was available, they were given asked for their opinion of single examples of wine with alternative closures

Corks Fail
Out of 40 wines where comparison was possible, cork only came out on top once - with a preference of 57% for the Esk Valley 2002 Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. Of the others, the tasters preferred the screwcap in 21 cases, and, in one case - the Kuehn Riesling from Germany - the crowncap. Otherwise, no significant difference was found.

Wines age better with Screwcaps
Revealingly, some of the strongest preferences were for older wines with screwcaps. The experimental screwcap Henschke Keyneton 1995 and Penfolds Bin 389 1996 from Australia scored 70% and 77% respectively. (The screwcap 1995 Penfolds Bin 2 actually scored 100%, but that was because the natural-cork stopped bottle was one of the two obviously cork-tainted wines in the tasting).There was also high praise for the freshness of the screwcap 1980 Yalumba Riesling from Australia, 1983 Kanonkop Paul Sauer red from South Africa, 1992 Provins Swiss wines and a pair of 1996 synthetic cork St Francis Cabernets from California. Sadly no cork-stoppered examples of these wines were available for tasting, but Robert Hill Smith, Chief Executive of Yalumba was confident that the screwcap had kept his wine in far better condition than a cork would have done.

No need to breathe
As Robert Joseph points out in his report in the October issue of Wine International, the explanation for the success of the alternative closures lies both in the fact that, unlike natural cork, they in no way flavour the wine and that they far more efficiently protect it from the air. The widely-held belief that wines need to "breathe" through the cork was, in fact dismissed by the leading Bordeaux authority Professor Pascal Ribereau-Gayon in 2000 when he wrote in the Handbook of Enology that "reactions that take place in bottled wine do not require oxygen". Proof of this is found in bottles of old port whose corks are dipped in sealing wax that presumably prevents the wine from breathing, and in the bottles that are occasionally rescued from the ocean floor.

Synthetic closures are currently used in 7-9% of bottles, a number that is growing due to the exasperation by producers and retailers with the unreliability of the corks they are able to buy. The pioneers of the recent use of screwcaps have been the winemakers of the New World. Among the Australian adopters are such well-known names as Yalumba, Penfolds, Jacobs Creek, Grossett and Henschke, as well as the vast majority of producers in the Clare Valley. In New Zealand a "screwcap initiative" was led by the world-famous Kumeu River and has been followed by a growing number of wineries including Jackson Estate, Felton Road and Cloudy Bay. In South Africa, Vergelegen - thought by many to be the best producer in the Cape - has introduced screwcaps, while Bonny Doon and Plumpjack whose wines sell for over �60 per bottle are the first of a number of Californian cult wineries to do so.

Europe - apart from Switzerland which has used screwcaps widely for decades - has been slower to introduce screwcaps, and even to experiment on alternatives. This is changing rapidly however. The Wine International tasting included screwcap Chablis and southern French Merlot from Laroche; Bordeaux from Dourthe and Chateau le Raz; Alsace from Paul Blanck; Vina Esmeralda from Torres in Spain and crown-cap Rieslings from Kuehn in Germany. Given the prestige of these producers and the success of their wines in this tasting, others are bound to follow their lead. They will be encouraged to do so by the biggest wine retailer in the UK, Tesco, which has had almost no customer-resistance to the introduction of large numbers of screwcap wines to its shelves. The chain is now selling up to a million bottles of high quality screwcap wine per week.

Unfortunately they never do any tests with the wines I like to age. Pulling some bottle from S. Africa from the 80s doesn't give me much confidence -- what's their aging track record? Give me a '78 Chave in screwcap and cork -- serve it to me blind and let me judge. I'm certainly not against screwcaps I just don't want them messing with the way my wine tastes. Maybe some say it's better and "fresher" but that might not be the style I prefer.

They will need to do similar experiments in Burgundy, Rhone and Bordeaux before they will be able to convince high end wine buyers.

I noticed you misspelled Burge. Are you talking about some copy wine? The real Grant Burge does not use screw tops on ANY of their top wines. Nor is there any discussion to do so. That covers their wines of distinction which are Filsell, Corryton Park, Balthasar and the holy trinity and the icon wines which are Shadrach, Abednego and Meshach.

Or are you referring to their common wines?

http://www.gottannins.com/news/grant...t-burge-wines/

" We’ve been doing test on our premium wines with some under screw caps and some under corks, then doing blind tasting. So far 80% of the wines are coming out on the side of cork. This is for wines more than five years old.

Right now we are sitting back and seeing how it all evolves"