Thursday, Jun. 15, 2006

Glass adds class to Oregon wines

By Andy Perdue, Wine Press Northwest

Peter Rosback is sick and tired of bad corks ruining his good wines.

Rosback owns Sineann, an ultrapremium producer of Oregon and Washington wines whose winery is in Newberg, Ore.

Like many Northwest wineries, Rosback is fighting back. At least 20 Oregon wineries and a handful of producers in British Columbia and Washington have given up on using the bark of a tree to seal their precious wines. Most notable is Hogue Cellars in Prosser, Wash., which last year began putting more than 300,000 cases of wine per year under screwcap.

Here's the problem with corks: A compound known as TCA can form when chlorine comes into contact with wood products, and wine corks are bleached with chlorine before they are sent to wineries. Thus, experts believe between 3 percent and 10 percent of all wines are tainted with TCA, leaving an off aroma that smells something like a wet dog sleeping on rotting cardboard. This is known as "corked" wine. The worst kind of cork taint is very faint and barely recognizable, thus it robs the wine of its very essence with little trace of the actual problem.

Screwcaps, on the other hand, are great closures. They seal the wine and impart no off aromas or flavors into a wine.

I used to say that we shouldn't blame winemakers for wine ruined by TCA, but I'm starting to change my mind. After all, they have choices now.

At Sineann, Rosback had a problem: He hates using corks, but he wasn't ready to switch to screwcaps because they have perception issues and are often associated with low-class wines.

Instead, he turned to a brand-new product called the Vino-Seal, which is made by Alcoa, a German company best known for its aluminum products. The Vino-Seal is a glass closure. It has a food-grade plastic O-ring that creates the seal.

Best of all, it looks classy.

Alcoa released the Vino-Seal (known as the Vino-Lok in Europe) in 2003, and more than 300 wineries are now using it, primarily in Germany and South Africa.

Rosback was intrigued by the product.

"Here's how I look at it," he said. "It's a better mechanically sealing system than Stelvin (an industry name for screwcaps). Cork has its problems short term and long term. Plastic corks have problems. So this is the best I've seen so far."

So last fall, Rosback made the switch, bottling up his 2004 Resonance Vineyard Pinot Noir with the Vino-Seal. And he wasn't even the first winery in Oregon to switch: Soléna Cellars, also in Newberg, started using it a few days earlier.

So far, Rosback has used the Vino-Seal in 1,400 cases of wine. The only issue is he's had to put them in manually because the machine that will insert them costs about $70,000 and there are none yet in the United States. Additionally, the Vino-Seals cost 70 cents each, and most corks cost between 10 cents and $1. An Alcoa spokeswoman told me this is just an issue of supply and demand. As more U.S. wineries switch to the Vino-Seal, that price will go down. In May, Whitehall Lane Winery, an upscale producer in Napa Valley, began to use Vino-Seal, so the revolution is beginning.

Rosback loves the new closure, and so do his customers.

"They go nuts!" he said. "They love it, they want it, and their jaws drop."

He said once a customer gets ahold of one of these glass closures, they fondle it and don't want to let it go.

I read about the Vino-Seal a couple of years ago but never saw one until I was having dinner this spring at Cuvée in Carlton, Ore., with Kevin Chambers, owner of Resonance Vineyard. Chambers brought two bottles of the Sineann and showed me the new glass closure.

I will admit to you right now: I kept the closures from both bottles, and I fondled them.

A few days later, I was driving up the Oregon Coast and stopped at The Wine Shack in Cannon Beach so I could buy a bottle of the Sineann to show people this new, beautiful closure that won't ruin the wine. I even bought a bottle of the Whitehall Lane Reserve Cab for the same reason.

"It looks good and feels good," Rosback said. "It doesn't require a tool to get it out. This could be the one."

Count me in as a believer.

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