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This film is the first in a series of eight by Neil Smith, owner of the WineSmith wine shop in Ashburn, Virginia. At the end of the video, you will have the opportunity to click to watch the next one.

Transcript

Neil Smith: Hi, my name is Neil Smith. I am the owner of a wine shop in Ashburn, Virginia called WineSmith. Today, I am going to give you a few points for how to pair wine confidently with food. We are going to cover some basic wine vocabulary to get us started and then I am going to give five simple rules for you to remember that as you plan your meals to pair wine with food. We are matching the weight of the wine with the food, complementing or contrasting wine flavors with the flavors and texture of the food, paying attention to sweetness and acidity in the wines, Dessert Wines and Sparkling Wines and then finally, practicing and experimenting often. But before we begin, it will be helpful to have a few items on hand to get the most out of this video. First is the Sparkling Wine, a dry white wine like Sauvignon Blanc and then a full bodied red wine like Cabernet Sauvignon. For food items, something salty like popcorn or salted peanuts, some crackers, two types of cheeses - one soft and creamy like goat’s cheese and something else that’s a little bit harder and firmer like cow’s cheese, some barbeque sauce, plain grilled chicken strips, some cake donuts and some lemon wedges.

So before we begin, let me tell you a little bit about myself. Prior to opening this store one year ago, I spent over a year studying and tasting wines. Since we have opened, I have conducted several classes on wine basics and how to pair wine with food. So with that said, let’s get started on pairing wine with food and I hope you will take away lots of information from the video.

The future of wine bottle closures is getting clearer (to me). The future of wine bottle closures is screw caps.

Wine drinkers cannot have helped but notice that many winemakers make the leap from corks in favour of screwcap closures. Some wine lovers even rant that corks should be abandoned.

A series of trials had been undertaken by both the University of Burgundy (1960s) and the Australian Wine Research Institute (1970s) and consecutive tastings proved that screwcaps were indeed a viable alternative to natural cork.

For instance, Stelvin is the best-known brand of screwcaps and it is used on Taylors Cabernets.

“No other industry in the world accepts the type of product failure experienced using cork” says George Fistonich of New Zealand screwcap pioneer Villa Maria . Fistonich has been standing firm and all Villa Maria bottles are screwcapped. New Zealand producers have followed and have started a so-called Screwcap Wine Seal Initiative
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Screwcap Initiative gets vocal on the radio

In July 2007 an advertising campaign started on the NZ radio. It was embarked upon by the Screwcap Initiative. It has high profile winemakers talking in favour of their preferred wine bottle closure. Wine maker Michael Brajkovich of Kumeu River Wines in Auckland is one of them.

In the advertisement he says, “We were one of the first to export wine in a
screwcap wine bottle. The Old World wine trade didn’t like the idea - at first, they liked
the romance of the cork. But a few of us New World winemakers knew it fixed the problem ofcork taint and once the public twigged to it, it was their seal of quality. It’s another
example of New Zealanders going with what works for us and then finding out that the rest
of the world agrees.”

The advertisement is backed by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and their website www.exportyear.co.nz. “We are right behind the exporters,” says a spokesperson.

Business demand

Chris Hatcher is the chief winemaker at Wolf Blass, Australia. In 2000 he said that their British distributor had asked that the entire next shipment of Annie’s Lane wines be Stelvin-sealed. Now Wolf Blass bottle some of their super-premium Platinum reds under Stelvin. Henschke, Australia, started screwcap bottling with their Keyneton 1995.

In the USA the Bonny Doon winery has championed Stelvin and has set up a Death of the Cork website. It should be added that an extra incentive for the change is that wine company bean counters also love screwcaps as they are cheaper than corks.

In a similar vein, wine critics now mention whether wines they review use screwcaps and restaurant wine lists follow. Consumer acceptance will grow accordingly. What was once a trickle will become a flood — in time.

A new book on the topic of wine closures is due this October. It is entitled ‘TO CORK OR NOT TO CORK: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle’, by George M. Taber, the author of ‘Judgment of Paris’ (Scribner, 2005). A preview of the book is this good-looking fact sheet on wine closures (PDF) (4 MB).

Cork used to be useful

Corks were certainly revolutionary in the 17th century when British ale and French champagne makers started to use cork stoppers instead of traditional closures made of hemp soaked in oil. That innovation certainly improved the quality of wines greatly and without it the development of champagne would have been impossible. But in the age of the microchip we are still using the archaic and risky technology of stoppers made from oak bark.

Cork taint

Why risky? Depending on whom you talk to cork taint (TCA) affects maybe five per cent of bottles, making them unpalatable. Yet, strangely, it has taken more than three centuries for winemakers and consumers to grow tired of wines that are diminished in quality due to this taint and to other problems such as unwanted cork flavours, leakage, cork deterioration and so forth. (For example, the renowned Penfolds Wine Clinics’ main focus is the replacement of dodgy corks).

Screwcap benefits

Screwcaps on the other hand are taint free and impermeable.

No cork taint

Everyone you ask will give you a different answer, but the general consensus from the trade is that between 5-15% of wine is adversely affected by 2,4,6 trichloroanisole. This can occur simply when chlorine is used to wash the cork bark or, more worryingly, it can be due to a contamination of the trees themselves due to the use of organic pesticides which contain chlorine and in this case, affect several harvests.

No more sporadic oxidation

The ideal closure should provide an air tight seal to the wine bottle. A good quality cork is a perfect closure, however, as with all natural products, quality variations mean that “random oxidation” has become the second biggest problem linked to natural corks.

“Driven” closures - whether they are natural or synthetic – need good elasticity in order to fill the gaps and irregularities within the bottle neck. In addition to this, natural corks also contain pits, cracks or insect holes and these create a weakness within the seal that can lead to leakage and oxidation.

Traditionalist criticise screwcaps saying that they are not romantic, however, this industrially-produced closure has the advantage of being more consistent identical, therefore making bottle variation a thing of the past.

Screwcaps also seal from around the outside of the bottle, therefore imperfections within the bottle neck are immaterial and the pressure (approx. 160kg) exerted on the head of the screwcap during bottling ensures that it is totally airtight.

Screwcaps avoid flavour modification, including scalping

Cork is a natural product, therefore, it is inevitable that it will impart some level of taste on the wine to a lesser or greater degree.

As John Belsham of Foxes Island and also current NZSCI president says, “We ran a very simple trial of putting corks into glasses of acidified water. There was a varying degree of colour and flavour taint in all glasses – all except one - the glass containing no cork.”

Screwcaps are totally neutral and therefore do not modify the wine in any way, allowing it to retain the original characteristics and age uniformly.

AWRI research has discovered that the TDN flavour molecule - which gives a kerosene type flavour to white wines - is totally absorbed by plastic closures and partially absorbed by natural cork. This is known as flavour scalping and according to the AWRI, there is no evidence of flavour absorption from screwcaps and this therefore explains why they are so well suited to delicate, aromatic wines such as Rieslings.

Young taste

“Screwcaps have shown wines that are brighter, clearer and more focused. Fruit and mineral characters shine through better than before” says Ken Canaiolo Engebretsen, President of the Norwegian Sommelier Association.

Aging with screwcaps

To test their longevity a number of wine companies (notably Yalumba) have bottled wines under both screwcaps and cork over the last few decades. Comparative tastings of these museum wines indicate that Stelvin bottled wines are fresher, cleaner and retain better colour than examples of the same wine under cork. There are criticisms that screwcaps seal too well and can create reductive characters in wines. This is less true today and should only concern wines that you keep a few years.

Cork is doomed

The list of winemakers actively supporting screwcap is growing. A recent example of conversion is that of a well-known and well-regarded winery in Long Island, NY. It’s Paumanok Vineyards.

For near-term wine the days of cork as a closure are numbered.

Statistics show that a steady reduction in violent crime is followed by a steady increase in the volume of wine consumed in the USA. That was between 1994 and 2004.

Here is the graph which plots US total violent crime and wine volumes bought in the USA over the year. Conversely crime rise is followed by a decrease in wine consumption. It was the case in the USA between 1983 and 1994.

What does it prove? To me it demonstrates nothing. It only illustrates that statistics are not truthful in themselves. They even may appear to show a relationship where there is none. Some people may even use them to mislead. (I stop at the top of the slippery slope of politics but feel free to comment.)

Here is another nice illustration: US growth and global warming are highly correlated. The chart plots US GDP and yearly average anomaly of temperatures worldwide. Maybe it could mean that an unstable climate is good for your wealth? Obviously it does not. It only illustrates a point that is being proven at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This point roughly is that the output of material goods induces climate change.

Flavor and aroma in wine are closely linked. In fact, Dr. Marion Baldy who teaches a University-Level course in the evaluation of wine, jokingly refers to her class as the “Winesmelling Course”. What you taste in a given wine depends most heavily on cooperation from your sense of smell. The rich, complex odors and flavors of wines are for the most part sensed by the olfactory epithelium­ a specialized patch of millions of nerve endings at the top and rear of the nasal cavity, above and behind the nose. Sometimes wine tasters suck a stream of air through a portion of wine they have taken into their mouth, bubbling it through the wine in the process. This volatilizes the aromatic components in the wine so that they are carried into the epithelium and amplified.

But once a wine has been tasted, how do we describe what we’ve perceived?

We all describe odors differently probably because of our differing life experiences and our varying abilities to perceive scents. In particular, it becomes challenging for most of us to place a name on a particular odor once we’ve encountered it again. This brings up a issue in the tasting and evaluation of wines­ How do we communicate consistently with one another
the flavors aromas found in wines?

To address this issue, Professor Ann Noble of the University of California, Davis developed the wine aroma wheel in the 1980s. Similar tools existed in the beer and scotch whisky industries, I am told. Professor Noble used the approach of grouping similar aromas into descriptive categories, which were then organized into groups by origin and/or similarity of smell and displayed in the circular format shown in Figure 1. This provided a common “catalog” of descriptive and commonly perceived wine aromas­ a lingua franca which allows our epitheliums to relate to one another.

Figure 1: The Wine Aroma Wheel

There are 12 fundamental groupings of aromas in the “catalog”, each of which has two or three sub-categories related to the fundamental. These sub-categories, in-turn, have multiple specific descriptors which pin-point an aroma. Often, the specific descriptors have reference-standards; pure essence of that aroma that can be brewed, extracted, or otherwise reproduced.

Recipes for making aroma standards can be found in article by NobLE, A.C.et al, in the American Society for Enology and Viticulture 38:143-146( 1987). Additionally, colored, plastic laminated copies of the wine aroma wheel (copyright ACNOBLE 1990) may be obtained from A.C.Noble, Dept. Vit and Enology, Univ. California, Davis, CA 95616; FAX 916 752 0382; email acnoble@ucdavis.edu; phone 916 752 0387.

On an editorial note­ aromas in wines can be pleasing to one person and offensive to another. Some folks enjoy an “earthy” wine or a “microbiological” wine (something I might call funky). A little bit of one component can be complex and interesting, whereas a lot can be a flaw. Its all a matter of taste, after all, isn’t it? Also­ these terms are just an attempt by academics to standardize perceived aromas so that they can be accurately discussed. Too often, this sort of tool risks usage in a snobbish or intimidating way­ in all cases I feel one should first concentrate on what’s tasted and smelled and enjoyed in the wine. Keep these “standard” terms as a backdrop to your tasting experience, not a facade.

So where in wine grapes do these aromas come from? Certainly human intervention in the wine growing process, or the introduction of human-made elements can effect the flavors and aromas in wines. But surprisingly mother nature can imbue in her fruit many surprising aromas­ some of which may seem man-made but they are entirely natural. I thought it would be instructive to list the twelve fundamental categories of the aroma wheel and relate some of my thoughts and experiences on just what happens in the vineyard or the winery that can produce each effect.

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