Salisbury Vineyards

OK, WineGrape Club members, I feel that we know each other well enough now to take on screw-caps versus corks debate. We have gone over to screw-caps for the majority of our wines. The simple reason is that we can guarantee a good bottle of wine with a screw-cap; whereas, we can’t be sure with a cork bottle. The range for cork failure runs around 5% in the industry. That is one in 20 that can be bad. How many businesses do you know that could eat that kind of loss? If you had the hot dog stand at the beach and one out of twenty of your hot dogs were bad, how long would you be in business?

That is the problem. We have to taste every bottle with a cork served at the tasting room or at a wine pouring event before we serve anyone for fear of a bad bottle. Not so with screw-caps, we just pour them without checking. Corked wines smell like wet cardboard – musty and grassy. The compound is TCA (2,4,6-Trichloroanisole) which is so bad you can pick it up at the rate of one sugar cube dissolved in 100 large swimming pools. The problem is not so much the obviously corked bottle of wine but the ones that are in the early stages of a corked wine. They may be a little “off” but to the average consumer it just doesn’t taste very good and we will probably lose a customer.

The problem starts back in the forest and then along the cork processing chain where TCA and TBA (Tribromoanisol) settle in the wood and fight off boiling, chlorine, microwave, and the new micro-organism fighting enzymes processes that are designed to sterilize the cork. Tradition is hard habit to kick but things change. The medical business changed from corks to other closures long ago when they discovered that corks were motels for bad “bugs”. As for the synthetic corks, they do not form a good seal with the glass and eventually leak or give a plastic smell to the wine. So that leaves us with the screw-cap.

The screw-cap is pressed onto the bottle at 400 psi and then crimped. The tip of the bottle is pressed into a wafer inside the cap creating a perfect seal. It is unfortunate that we all grew up with Ripple, Thunderbird, and the Gallo jug wines and think that screw caps are on only cheap wines. The other knock on screw-caps is that people think that older wines need corks to age and wine is a living thing and needs to breathe. That is wrong because aging is not an oxygenation process but a reduction process. Corks let in a miniscule amount air, if any, and if they did much it would ruin the wine. Many recent studies have proven that screw-capped wines are fruitier with less oxidation, less variability, no TCA, and mature gracefully and slowly. Our goal is to present a wine that reflects what is in the vineyard and is as pure as we can deliver and not tainted by the closure.

An interesting statistic is that in over 60% of the households in the United States you can not find a corkscrew! You can’t fly with them anymore and the majority of our customers are here on holiday and on the way to the beach, spa, motel, or the dunes. Therefore, the convenience factor becomes a big deal. So what do we have to do to win over you non-believers – put a prize under the cap? Come to think of it that is not a bad idea! I’m going to talk to my supplier.

We are still pruning and tying up kicker canes on the Cab and Syrah (a year old cane, one per vine, trained onto the upper wire on the more aggressive vines to slow them down and spread out the fruit). And we have bud break on the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir blocks, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day. We hope to see you soon and send any feedback about the article above to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it Cheers - John