New York Riesling Diary: Day 17 – would your rather your wine was corked or get elegantly screwed?

Darn it! I wanted to put off the theme of corks versus screw cap closure for Riesling and other wines, because so much has already been written about it, but my hand was forced by the events of yesterday evening. No, the wine in my glass was not tainted by the sea of corks pictured which cover the ceiling of a great bar on Bleeker Street close to my temporary East Village home called ‘Von’. In fact, I think this is one of the best use of cork. It’s a decorative material which is good on ceilings, floors or as the soles of sandals standing on those floors, but I would prefer it not to come into contact with my wine. Not that I have nothing against a cork closure which functions and leaves my wine intact, but I have had too many bad experiences with cork (TCA is the name of the substance) taint to feel anything but intense skepticism of wines with cork closures regardless of their price. Although the quality of wine corks has got better than during the high point of the taint problem around a decade ago when about 3.5% of all bottles with cork closures were heavily TCA-tainted wine and maybe another 5% were lightly TCA-tainted (dull and fruitless). However, we are still not down to a 1% failure rate, which strikes me as the absolute maximum that could be deemed acceptable, as last night proved.

I went out to a new modern Italian-American place on East 1st Street called L’Apicio with Volker Donabaum of AI Selections and Amy Troiano and we had a very tasty and interesting meal. The service was pretty good although the place was packed and there were many interesting, moderately-priced wines like the just off-dry, piercingly-fresh 2011 Riesling from the Teutonic Wine Company in Oregon; one of the best Rieslings I’ve had from that State. It was fine in spite of being under cork, but the Late Harvest Riesling from Hermann J. Weimar in the Finger Lakes being served by the glass was not. The first bottle may well have just been open too long, but either way it was definitely not in prime condition. So they kindly opened another bottle, but it was savagely corked, raped by TCA! In top form this wine in has a diamond-like brilliance of flavor that is literally breathtaking. Our disappointment was great, because that was the last bottle of this wine which L’Apicio had. So we decamped to ‘Von’ and danced with friends of Volker and Amy’s until I forget the bitter aftertaste of the corked Riesling and pretty much everything else too. This morning I chanced upon the object pictured below and realized there was no way around telling this story in full.

A lot of people who reject the screw cap closure do so because they say that wine under screw cap doesn’t age. The last time I visited him Martin Tesch of the Tesch estate in Langenlonsheim/ Nahe in Germany pulled out a bottle of 1966 ‘Goldener Oktober’, a cheap blended German white, under the screw cap pictured. The wine was fully mature, but still alive thanks to what was a fairly new technology 45 years ago. Note the arrow on the screw cap indicating the direction to turn it, something you’ll also find on the screw caps of Tesch’s pristine dry Rieslings. So there’s really nothing fundamentally new about this technology and there’s no doubt that wines under screw cap, even simple wines, age longer than those under almost all corks. By the way, there is a minimal failure rate for wines under screw cap due to accidental mechanical damage to the closure. Tesch reckons that this is around 0.1%, which is at least one order of magnitude better than the very best corks available. Of course, the juicy and refreshing Château Benoit Müller-Thugrau from Oregon which fueled our dancing at ‘Von’ was also under screw caps and each bottle was perfect. Which is why I’d rather get elegantly screwed than have corked wine!