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To Cork or Not to Cork

I read a book review in the WSJ a few weeks ago. The book was about the cork industry. I'm not exactly a wine connoisseur, so I don't know much about the general industry. I do know that out of the many bottles of wine I've had, I've never come across a rotten cork. I was quite surprised to read the statistic about the percentage of wine bottles where the cork ruins the wine. Here's the excerpt:

For a couple of hundred years, winemakers and wine drinkers understood that the wine in a small percentage of bottles -- as much as 3% to 5% -- would suffer from the contamination of bad corks (and, sometimes, bad barrels). The culprit was a chemical called tricholoanisole, or TCA. It caused wine to become "corked" -- that is, to smell like a moldy pile of damp cardboard. The TCA problem -- apparently originating at the early stages of cork harvesting -- seemed to get worse over the past few decades. But the cork industry, dominated by a handful of big companies in Spain and Portugal, refused even to acknowledge the problem, let alone do anything about it.
The cork makers were in for a rude awakening. "To cork's critics, the failure rate is both outrageous and unacceptable," writes George Taber in "To Cork or Not to Cork." "They repeatedly argue that if 3% or 5% of Toyota cars or IBM computers failed, those companies would be out of business." So over the past decade, winemakers have taken matters into their own hands, exploring alternatives that include, lately, glass caps.

A 3 - 5% failure rate is really pretty high! Can you imagine buying a $200 bottle of wine just to discover that the bottle is ruined because of the cork? Apparently screw caps and plastic corks are not necessarily the answer either, though. Here's an excerpt about that:

Maybe, but screw caps and synthetic corks may cause problems of their own: They may do such a good job sealing the bottle that they kill the wine. One of the first to explore this problem was Paul White, a journalist and wine expert in New Zealand, who has been on a crusade against the screw-cap revolution. Mr. White argues that cork is essential to wine's aging process because it lets trace amounts of oxygen into the bottle. A perfectly sealed wine bottle with a screw cap can, over time, suffer from something called "reduction" -- causing it to smell like sulfur-infused rotten eggs. The idea that a small amount of oxygen is essential to the aging of wine may not be universally accepted, but it is not new. As Louis Pasteur put it more than 150 years ago: "It is oxygen that makes the wine." Mr. White's criticism of screw caps has made him something of a pariah in New Zealand, where the wine industry is so heavily invested in them.

Gosh. Didn't realize the whole process was so complex. Maybe we should just resort to sippy boxes?
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