Corks, screwcaps, glass stoppers and fine wine
May 28th, 2008 by Ana Keller
Every year as we approach bottling we always have the corks, screwcaps, and recently we added the glass stoppers into the conversation. I always feel that synthetic corks look horrible, they are always short and I feel it sends a message of: hey we want to avoid corked wine, but we dont care about how we go about it!
Personally, Michael, our winemaker (who still has to write on our blog) and yours truly, work at doing our best to avoid corked wines. We use 2 different suppliers, Michael goes to through the exercise of smelling corks and corks soaked in a mixture of vodka and alchohol (a 12% solution of vodka, extracts components of the corks at the same rate a wine would but without the aromas of wine). So if you ever get a corked bottle, save the cork , shoot us an email and we can figure out what producer provided us with that cork, we will add that to our stats!
Anyway, we recently have felt that we want to use some glass stoppers for some of our wines, like the Pinot Gris. I think the glass stopper is elegant, and best of all it has the pop factor (whe you take it out : it pops!). mmm, however I am not quite sure we want that for all our wines. I wonder what you all think?
take care, and enjoy your day. Ana
Michelle Keller wrote on 06/2/08 at 1:03 pm :
I’m really excited to see the glass stoppers on the Pinot Gris. The screwcap/cork/rubber cork conversation is alive and going in the wine world and using glass toppers is certainly an elegant way to avoid using metal caps. I’m not aware of too many wineries that use glass, so I think Keller Estate will be one of the few using this method, which is certainly unique. I’m looking forward to seeing what they look like!