WITHOUT RESERVATIONS

Capped

Although draining a bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc is generally a joyous occasion — at least if it is a group activity — the odd fly does sometimes blunder into the ointment.

"The screw cap is the future," my friend said, twisting the screw cap from a bottle of the aforementioned New Zealand sauvignon blanc. My heart sank. He poured; the wine was good, rich but with adequate citrusy acid. "Many wineries now are putting regular corks in their cheaper bottlings and saving the screw caps for their better stuff."

You don't know the worst of it, I thought glumly, as our glasses clinked together in a toast to something or other — screw caps? Recently I had bought a couple of bottles of Höfer Grüner Veltliner, the lovely Austrian white wine, and found to my horror that the bottles had been sealed not with corks, not with plastic corks, not even with screw caps, but with those beer-bottle-type caps you have to peel off with a bottle opener. This turned out to be a highly familiar operation that came off without difficulty, and the wine was quite good — a deal, too: $8.99 for a liter. Still, the lack of romance and ritual was palpable.

The received wisdom in wineland is that screw caps are superior to conventional corks in every way: They are cheaper, they cannot impart cork taint, and they require no special tools or skills to operate. I will stipulate to the first two points despite the automatic equation of a cheaper industrial practice with a better one. But the prospective death of the cork-pulling ritual is a more serious matter. It implies the loss of yet more know-how and of a certain element of real, as opposed to prefabricated, drama: Will the cork come out cleanly or break up, and will the wine be good or tainted? Running these risks is part of the pleasure of wine.

Transparency is the word used to describe fundamental change that is not apparent to an end user. The hybrid car is a good example; it looks and works like an ordinary car, though its (unseen) drivetrain is revolutionary. The plastic cork is similar, preserving a ritual, a technique, a set of tools, while quietly eliminating problems of long standing. These advantages strike me as apparent and even (yes!) transparent.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com