Merchants, challengers showcase new corks

Alternatives to natural cork have nearly half the wine closure market.
SACRAMENTO BEE
It used to be so simple.
Not so long ago, all wine was bottled with a cork made from, well, cork.
Then, around 1990, the first synthetic cork -- the Cellucork, from England -- appeared. And with a pop, it opened a Pandora's bottle of alternatives.
The wine industry sells more than 15 billion bottles of its product each year worldwide. With prices for what the industry refers to as "closures" ranging from as little as a nickel to a dollar or more for the finest natural cork, there's plenty of money to be made in what might seem the rather simple business of holding wine in a container.
The world's natural-cork merchants and their challengers showed off their products recently in Sacramento, Calif., at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium, a convention that during three days drew about 10,000 people from throughout the wine business.
The alternatives to natural cork have grabbed roughly 45 percent of the U.S. closure market, according to Chris Sipola, vice president of Newpak USA, which distributes both natural and newfangled corks. In Australia and New Zealand, the numbers are much higher, with screw-on caps alone commanding 60 percent of the market or more.
More choices
And the choices are expanding each year: from cork-shaped stoppers made from proprietary blends of rubber, foam and plastic, to metal and plastic screw-tops -- not to mention new juice-box-style containers that eliminate the bottle altogether.
On the floor of the exhibition hall at the Sacramento Convention Center, John Belforte, president of Beltappo Inc., laid out his line of marbled, multicolored, thermoplastic corks. He stood in front of a rainbow-colored banner that read, "Break with tradition: Let's party!"
Belforte said he's been perfecting his product for 15 years, and claims that he's come up with something that offers many of the benefits of wine corks, without the problems of unreliability -- and it comes in colors, to boot.
The drive for new cork materials stems from the fact that natural corks contain varying amounts of a musty-smelling compound known as TCA. This chemical leaches into wine and, even at tiny concentrations, causes a noticeable smell and taste known as "cork taint" -- which leads to dissatisfied customers. In the 1990s, one study found that cork taint affected as much as 5 percent of all wine.
But while synthetic corks and screw caps prevent cork taint -- and tend to be cheaper as well -- they have their own problems, too. Wine goes bad in storage if it gets either too much or too little oxygen. High-quality natural cork will, ideally, let in just the right amount.