Choosing a good wine only half the battle - Packaging - Column

Brandweek, March 30, 1998 by Thomas Pellechia

When I reach for a bottle of wine these days, I pine for the old days of lead capsules. Now, I am no Luddite--I am personal-computerized to the hilt--and I don't own shares in lead-mining operations. I simply want to open a bottle of wine without incident.

It used to be I went into my favorite wine shop, my pockets bulging with the four dollars that once was the price for a reasonable bottle of wine. I grabbed from the shelf a wine I liked or a wine I hoped I would like. At home, I reached for my waiter's corkscrew, and, using the knife on one end of the corkscrew, I rimmed at the base of the lip of the bottle to cut away the lead capsule. Then I wiped the lip with a damp rag, slipped the screw into the cork and turned clockwise until I could clamp the claw of the device onto the bottle lip to provide a lever with which to pull up the cork. All that remained was to sniff, pour, swirl and drink. In the 1970s the domestic wine boom brought with it an abundance of new choices, a gradual rise in prices and "savvy" packaging. I sometimes grew weary, though, of so many disappointing wines inside slickly-packaged bottles. In the 1980s the anti-alcohol movement reared its Calvinist head not through moral preaching, but in partnership with health crazies. The health police warned that lead capsules were leeching their poison into wine, and that those of us who drink the grape would become brain-softened or decadent Romans.

The package gurus quickly came up with an alternative for banned leaded capsules--unleaded plastic capsules. The plastic capsules, include a pull-tab to make getting at the wine easier than ever before. You pull the little red or yellow tab and run it around the rim of the bottle. When you are done, the capsule is in two parts. You lift the top part and there in front of you is the glorious cork. Yeah, right.

Mostly, I pull one of the tabs it results in me holding a small piece of tab in one hand while reaching for my knife with the other so that I could cut away at the resistant plastic capsule which remains intact.

Another alternative to lead is a capsule that is part plastic and part metal. This capsule has no tab but does offer the combined annoyance of being nearly impervious to a knife yet capable of making its own clean incision into a finger.

My remedy for dealing with a recalcitrant capsule is to stick the point of the corkscrew right through it. When the cork comes up it rips through the capsule. This method produces a less professional-looking result, but it works.

A few years ago Robert Mondavi Winery began a packaging fad: a flange-necked wine bottle made of dark-colored glass. It seemed an attractive and relatively innocuous packaging concept at the time, which is why it is now ubiquitous. In my old job as wine salesman I endured lots of retailer complaints concerning the height of the new bottle which did not fit easily on prevailing shelves.

But my problem with the bottle is not its height. The flat lip of the flanged bottle spreads about 1/4-inch horizontally from the bottle neck. Capsuling would require retooling. Yet many producers could not let go of the capsule concept, so they sought to find a material with which to cover the cork. They played around with wax and waxed paper that was glued to the top of the cork, but neither worked well. Most producers ultimately settled on topping off the cork with a small plastic blob that looks like psychedelic wax and acts like tempered steel. I dare you to stick the point of a corkscrew right through it and turn.

Speaking of cork, many in the wine industry claim that from 3% to 5% of all wine is spoiled by tainted cork. (As soon as I hear such talk I brace myself for the coming packaging invention.) To meet the challenge of tainted cork the vine industry is turning to a synthetic stopper, which, some say, looks like cork. I don't want to burst anybody's bubble, but it does not look like cork. The synthetic stopper only resembles cork, and the purple one doesn't even do that.

I really don't need slick packaging for wine. In fact, give me a screw cap, even on a bottle that costs more than $ 10. 1 am prepared to forget about lead capsules. I am even prepared to forget about great prices and corks, provided the wine industry stops preventing me from getting at the wine.

Thomas Pellechia, a former vintner, is a wine and food writer in Hammondsport, NY. Reach him at booklink@servtech.com