One Australian Winery Ditches Screw-caps and Returns to Corks.
July 31, 2012 
Rusden Wines, (a winery located in the Barossa Valley region of Australia) has announced it’s giving-up on the screw-cap, and will return to bottling all of its wines under a cork. Rusden winemaker Christian Canute cited “persistent quality control issues” for the reason behind the move.
“Our wines are handmade and bottled without fining or filtration. Under a screw-cap I have noticed the wines ‘sweat’, producing overly dominant reductive characters, a problem we have never had under cork,” Canute went on to say.
Napa Valley-based Rutherford Wine Company has also moved from synthetic closures back to cork citing both environmental and technical benefits, and in the UK, large retailers have switched products back to cork for environmental reasons.
Click here for the full article from Harpers.
My Thoughts…
Maybe I haven’t been reading as many wine magazines and trade journals as I usually do, but this is actually the first story I’ve read where a winery has had quality issues with screw-caps. I do have to say that it came as quite a surprise!
I’ve certainly experienced plenty of problems with synthetic corks and will personally never buy something older than 3 years, if I know it’s sealed with a synthetic closure (albeit difficult to ascertain without removing the seal). They just seem to let in too much air.
It will be interesting to see if there are many other wineries that make the move back to cork…
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