Tim Atkin, one of the UK’s leading wine critics, was recently across the ditch in New Zealand where he was simultaneously struck by the willingness of the Kiwi winemakers to adopt screwcaps as well as what he describes as an ‘alarmingly high’ percentage of corked wines he experienced there. He even suggested that the cork industry was bunging down to New Zealand corks of a quality they ‘wouldn’t dare send the Aussies’. Then they must really be toughing it out in Kiwi, I respectfully suggest! I’m still finding between a taint rate between 4-5% in my tastings of Australian wines. On the other side of the ledger, I’m also finding a similar level of sulphide-related problems with wines sealed with screwcaps that were inappropriately finished prior to bottling. And not that it’s necessarily a related subject, I for one am becoming heartily sick of extracting wads of damp, spongy trifle from the necks of Australian wines, especially when I compare those currently available to the dense, tightly-knit corks deployed by the same producers fifteen years ago. There’s no way they will do the job as well or for as long.
