It’s scare-mongering time again in the cork debate. Neil Walsh, managing director of Cork Supply Australia, whose subsidiary Newpak distributes alternative wine seals called nomacorc̠, issued a media release suggesting that the widespread use of screwcaps could ‘damage the image and reputation of many premium wines in the long-term’. The reasoning, if you could call it such, behind this remark is that the emerging use of screwcap closures for cheaper wines will ’cause a backlash’, since they would become associated with cheap wines which would result in ‘enormous damage to the premium labels’. Since cork itself has been used for cheaper wines for the better part of a century and synthetic alternatives were developed for this market but have largely been discredited, one wonders whether Mr Walsh might have found a more fortunate way of verbalising whatever it was that was bottled up inside him. He goes on to add: ‘Ultra premium and icon wines (A$15+), on which screwcaps are being introduced, represent approximately 6 per cent of the bottled wine market, with a significant portion of this being red wine with a strong following for natural cork.’ Little wonder I’m confused.
