Spanish Wine from Spain

Corks away?

There are three words guaranteed to get wine buffs going, usually after they have consumed a few glasses of the stuff: Chardonnay; Decanting; Parker.

Some drinkers think Chardonnays should be strangled at birth because it is not a ‘serious’ wine, but you have to admit it has done more to introduce New World wines to the masses than any other single grape variety. As to decanting, this is fine if done by an experienced sommelier but too many people decant wines when there is no need – and others decant wines that actually deteriorate in the process.

And as to Parker, our American cousins are almost alone in allowing their choice of wine to be dictated by a one-man scoring system with questionable values that have been shown to be less than a majority taste.

But there’s a fourth word that is arguably even more fisticuff-provoking than any of the previous not so ‘bon mots’. Nothing, but nothing, gets wine-makers and wine-lovers so animated without reasonable cause. And everyone is talking from the heart not the head. The word is – Corks.

From about the 5th century on oil-soaked rags were replaced by rudimentary corks, and over the centuries a mystique developed that, among other things, dictated that a cork for a Gran Reserva wine should be 44 mm long. Actually the length of the cork has no effect on the wine in the bottle, but it is patent that after 15 years all ageing wines need their corks replacing as they start to crumble. It is also a myth that wine ‘breathes’ through the cork, as a cork must be a hermetic seal or the wine suffers terminally.

So far, so corking, but there are problems ahead. Cork is derived from the bark of the alcornoque, the oak tree from which huge planks of cork are cut every 10-12 years once it has achieved maturity after 25 years.

Cork is a living organism, and even after being fumigated and sterilised can still harbour microbes that can get into the wine. The list is endless but they are all usually grouped together under the title of TCA, and in the wine world it is Enemy Number One (well, okay, the possibility of phylloxera is remote). A ten-year old cork can harbour a bacterium playfully known as penicillium roqueforti.

But here it starts to get interesting – and highly controversial.

The most often-quoted figure in northern Europe is one bottle in ten: that is the number spoilt by being corked or, more delicately, the wine contained in the bottle has in some way been contaminated by cork-borne bacteria. This is a hugely detrimental figure, meaning that in every case of wine of 12 bottles you buy – more than one bottle will be spoilt. Even respected wine critics will unabashedly quote this highly questionable statistic.

I was at a convivial luncheon the other day at Garry Waite’s Rincon de Guadalpin restaurant with a well-known English wine critic, and flying wine maker to boot who declared the first bottle of an otherwise excellent Penedés to be corked. Same with the second bottle. Even the third bottle had the same taste – so it was decided that it was nothing to do with the cork – just the tang of the wine.

At a more recent luncheon of Spanish wine writers at Marbella’s El Portalon, the mention of the possibility of a wine being corked produced reactions such as, ‘Can’t remember the last time,’ ‘Almost never’, ‘Very occasionally’. Certainly, this ‘straw poll did not even marginally approach the 10% northern European ‘official’ figure.

And worst of all, and real ‘burying-your-head-in-your-hands-stuff’, is the man at the next table in a restaurant in the Home Counties, who sends the wine back because it is ‘corked’. What he means is – he doesn’t like what he ordered and/or it has a taste that he didn’t expect but yet is probably perfectly okay and he is trying to impress his girlfriend.

So, is this a real problem or an imagined one?

On one level it has to be recognised that there is no such thing as defective corks, only bacteria-carrying corks – and they do spoil wine.

One of Spain’s best-known bodegas, Vega Sicilia, went through a decade of cork problems that nearly put it out of business. No-one knows why it was Vega Sicilia and no other winery, but it is now part of oft-quoted local lore. More recently Australia’s Leeuwin winery rebottled all its Art Series Chardonnay stock and replaced the cork stoppers with screw caps. The wine stored was oxidising, which can only mean that air was entering through the stopper. Subsequently the winery asked its customers if they preferred cork or screw caps and all but two voted for the latter. Now it is wall-to-wall screw caps – with no option at this leading winery.

Spain produces 32% of the world’s cork, after main producer Portugal’s 52%. The remainder comes from Italy, France, Morocco, Algiers and Tunisia.

In Portugal, at least, if wine makers reduce cork consumption, the effects on the environment will be devastating. The cork forests in the south of the country are home to lynx, imperial eagles and many species of wild life that have made the forests their home for centuries. Cork trees are less susceptible to fire than other trees. Although the cork harvested only represents 15% of what goes for bottle stoppers, its value is 80% of the whole. A major shift to other types of stopper would wipe out the livelihood of thousands of smallholders.

But all that is an afterthought. The question we have to ask ourselves is, are we happy unscrewing rather than uncorking?

No-one seriously proposes that reservas and wines that can be cellared for many years should not have corks, so what we are talking about here is wine that is sold in vast quantities for daily drinking.

Is it a hardship or a pleasure to give a quick twist to a screw cap and, presto, the bottle is open? Nor is it a simple battle between genuine corks and screw caps. There are now many varieties of artificial cork, usually made of plastic, that still need a corkscrew and a bit of elbow power. Some are okay and some are awful, but the wine in the bottle does not appear to suffer.

So why use artificial cork at all – and not go straight to screw caps?

Well, perhaps there are legions of wine drinkers out there who do not consider they have opened a real bottle of wine unless they had to do it with a corkscrew.

Amazing! Not once in this article did I use the word tradition!