My sister still laughs about it.

The night we were at a New Year’s party, and our gracious host (who had been celebrating heartily, as we all were) offered to open a bottle of wine to fill her empty glass. Corkscrew in one hand, bottle in the other, she describes how he struggled just to get the foil cut off from the top. “Surely he’s not THAT drunk,” she thought to herself. “What’s so hard about opening this bottle?”

She got her answer when, seconds later, he drew back his corkscrew to reveal the bottle had no foil on it to begin with. No cork, either.

He’d been using the corkscrew on a screw cap. 

The host later laughed with us, and admitted that he wasn’t sure what embarrassed him more: not realizing the bottle was a screwcap, or serving screw top wine in the first place!.

But here’s the thing — and Charlie and I were quick to point it out —

There’s no shame in screw cap wine!

Some truly fantastic wines are bottled with that kind of lid, and there are good reasons for it. So if you’ve been judging a wine based on it’s closure, stop! You may be missing out on some fantastic vino.

Vino such as… well, almost every single bottle produced by New Zealand. Yeah, some 95% of the wine bottled by the kiwis is closed with a screw cap, also known as a Stelvin closure.  Australia uses them a lot, too. Why? Maybe because they’ve figured out something a lot of wine producers are coming to accept — that corks, while romantic in their tradition, pose a very particular and real threat to wines.

Ever heard of a wine being “corked?”

It’s a dreaded term used to describe a wine that’s been affected by TCA, or trichloroanisole, a compound that sometimes arises when naturally occuring fungi found on the cork are treated with antimicrobial agents. TCA causes the wine to smell and taste bad, often compared to wet cardboard or a musty basement. While it isn’t dangerous, it is nasty, and can ruin a beautiful bottle of wine.

Worse yet, it could totally turn you off a particular type of wine or producer entirely. Why? Well, when TCA is really noticeable, you can spot it pretty quickly; the smell is unmistakable, and you know right away the bottle is flawed. But when it’s faint, and just barely afflicted? You may taste the wine and think it just doesn’t taste good, but not realize it’s not the wine talking, but the TCA. You could condemn that winery or that grape type without realizing that the cork was to blame for your bad experience. And that would really be a shame.

I’ve heard some estimates as high as one in every 20 bottles of wine are corked. Charlie and I opened a large-format bottle of high-quality, much-anticipated Brunello a few months ago only to find it was corked and undrinkable. There wasn’t a darn thing we could do about it and no one to blame.

So the New Zealanders have figured out one sure-fire way to protect their delicious wines — forget about the corks! Use a screw cap instead.