What's next in the wine capsule department?

Wines & Vines, March, 1993 by Larry Walker

The wine industry has been scrambling for the past few years to come up with a replacement for the tin-lead wine capsules. Night lights have been burning in chemical labs around the world to come up with a wine capsule that is reasonably priced and looks as good as tin-lead. Although some hint that they are on the brink of a major breakthrough, there are no clear answers yet.

Even though competition for the $25 million wine capsule market in the United States is fierce, some find the market in such a state of flux that they are simply waiting things out "until the dust settles." Only a few years ago, things were rocking along pretty smoothly: the high end of the market used tin-lead capsules, the low end, for the most part, used PVC (poly vinyl chloride) plastics and that's about all anyone needed to know about it.

That began to change in the late 1980s when several states began imposing a ban on lead, or at least a significant reduction in the use of lead in wine capsules. This action wasn't taken, as some suppose, because of the possibility of lead from the capsules getting into the wine, but to keep highly-toxic lead out of landfills. The lead-in-wine issue surfaced later and made industry efforts to get the lead out in a hurry even more critical.

There is, at the moment, no federal standard for the amount of lead allowed in wine capsules, but with several states having fixed the maximum lead levels at 250 parts per million for this year and 100 parts per million in 1994, federal action becomes a moot point. (It is worth noting that the Food and Drug Administration has approved a lead content of 500 ppm in tin-plated used for canned food.)

With the virtual abandonment of the traditional lead-tin capsule, the scramble was on for a replacement. There are now four basic capsules being offered, none of them truly new but all improved in some way.

First, at the low end is the PVC capsule. It's the cheapest and, according to some, the least attractive capsule. The great advantage for PVC is price. At $40 or slightly under per thousand, PVC is far and away the cheapest capsule. But one PVC guru warned to beware of "bargains" if the thickness of the PVC cap is under 70 microns.

There are two basic types of PVC--transfer direction or TD and machine direction or MD. Both types shrink, but TD shrinks a minimum in length and a maximum in diameter, while MD shrinks the opposite way. MD is the cheapest of the two but one industry insider said that TD makes the best capsule material.

PVC is lead-free and with the right equipment can be applied smoothly, although it usually shows a seam. But PVC also faces a possible environmental challenge over the issue of disposal, as it gives off certain noxious chemicals when burned.

Some raised the possibility of a plastic material called PET replacing PVC. PET is the stuff used to make plastic shopping bags. Major suppliers include Kodak and Dupont. Although PET has been touted as more environmentally friendly than PVC, according to some it's strictly a matter of image.

The next step up is the polylam capsule, which Curt Goodsill of Lafitte Cork & Capsule described as a "sandwich, with the bread being aluminum and the peanut butter being polyethylene." Polylam has been used for a long time as a sparkling wine capsule where the "pleated look" is acceptable because of the wire hood. But PVC, according to Goodsill, can now be spun so that it doesn't fold or wrinkle, but it does leave a seam. Polylam sells in the $60 per thousand range. It is being seriously considered as a capsule for premium wines because new generations of polylam are more attractive, and the price is right. The thicker the aluminum bread in the polylam sandwich, the better the capsule looks. The aluminum layer is also critical to the quality of the capsule and can be a different thickness on the outside or inside of the capsule.

The pure aluminum capsule looks good, meets all existing lead standards, is easily recycled and the price is comparable or only slightly higher than the old tin-lead capsules at about $85 per thousand. It has one major drawback: it is difficult to remove and the sharp edges can cut. Suppliers and producers say that those problems are being solved by new aluminum caps that aren't as thick as the first ones that came on market a few years ago.

The all-tin capsule (which still contains traces of lead) is, generally, the capsule preferred by most premium producers. It looks good, is fairly easily removed and can be recycled, although not as easily as aluminum. It's simple to get a uniform wall thickness with tin and it takes silk-screen printing. In the past, tin caps were very expensive, up to $140 per thousand, but recently prices have been coming down. One leading supplier, for example, offers tin capsules at $85 to $95 per thousand, depending on the thickness of the tin. (Some industry observers question whether, given the market conditions and sources of supply, tin prices can remain low in the long run.)