brainsnorkel.com

Wines bottled with screw caps don’t suffer the scourge of cork taint, which means the public should experience many fewer bad bottles of wine than before. Cork taint affects around 10% of all cork-bottled wine. Apart from the scarcity of non-Portuguese cork trees, the screw-top’s advantages include upright cellaring, and they’re very convenient if you find yourself at a housewarming with a nice bottle and no corkscrew.

Old-school wine enthusiasts claim that real cork usually adds good characteristics to wine flavours that screw caps don’t. A recent SMH lifestyle special ran a tasting on pairs of wines where the only difference was that one had been bottled with a screw cap and the other with a cork. They came out slightly in favour of screw caps.

At this point, I’d like to introduce some circumstantial evidence: A lot of liquor stores put video surveillance cameras in their cool rooms.

It is common practice in liquor stores that do not have video surveillance in their cool rooms, for people — generally the youth demographic — to let themselves into the cool room. Once inside, their objective is to drink as much beer as they can, as quickly as they can, and then walk out of the liquor store without raising suspicion leaving the empties behind. Hiding behind boxes of beer is common when there is a surveillance camera present. Innovative cool room hermits have been known to create “beer igloos” to evade detection.

An ex-employee of a liquor store told me (apocryphally) that secretly bringing your empty beer cans from a weekend BBQ and dumping them in a liquor store cool room while someone you don’t like is working their shift is an effective method of increasing the unemployment rate. But back to the story.

Last night I brought home a bottle of white wine from a reputable local bottle shop and discovered that its ullage was suspicious, and the screw cap no longer had a seal.

O brave new world that has such people in’t!

I’m a supporter of screw-caps, but I’d never considered them from the perspective of convenience being the enemy of security. I wonder how long it will be before I get out of the habit of assuming wine bottles are sufficiently tamper-proof?