Sips: Bag wine follow-up – tasting month-old sauvignon blanc

Pouring myself a glass of sauvignon blanc from a container that was first opened 30 days ago is not among the more appealing wine images that come to mind. But that’s exactly what I did the other night when I realized that it had been almost a month since I first tasted and wrote about the 2009 North Coast Sauvignon Blanc from Indulge, which is offering a line of California wines in a lightweight bag called an Astrapouch, complete with a little plastic tap with which to pour yourself a glass. At the time, I found the wine attractive and a good value at $20 for a liter and a half, the equivalent of two conventional wine bottles. Marketing of the wine includes an emphasis on its environmentally friendly packaging and the claim that it will remain fresh for up to a month. In fact, the wine was just fine, perhaps not quite so fresh tasting as it was when first opened, but still showing its fruit without any off tastes that would emerge had a regular bottle been left in the fridge for a month. I doubt that many people will leave the wine that long, but it’s nice to know that the system works.

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Swirls: Dangerous corkscrews, wine temperatures, preserving wine once opened

SWIRL: For every newfangled wine opening gadget I’ve tried over the years, I’ve always gone back to any number of basic corkscrews.   They’re reliable and safe. I was reminded of this as I read about the recall of a Sunbeam product, the Air Pump Wine Opener (Model NBSKWA2600), sold this past November and December by QVC.  The problem? Some wine bottles have been breaking while people have been using the product. Sunbeam said it had received 52 such complaints, including 22 reports of  injuries. About 159,000 of the openers are being recalled. Read the press release from the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

SWIRL: Wine temperature is everything. Okay, not everything, but a very important factor in the enjoyment of wine. Most red wines are served too warm, making them taste clumsy; most whites are poured too cold, which obscures their tastes. With that in mind, how about a thermometer that tells you when your wine has reached the temperature you desire – a wireless thermometer to boot? Read about it in the LA Times.

SWIRL: Once opened, many wines actually get better with exposure to air, whether its for an hour or two or even two or three days. Beyond that, air becomes the enemy and things start  to go downhill.  A new product may help. It’s called the Platypus Platypreserve Wine Preservation System. As far as I can tell, it’s a variation of the system used in boxed wines that expels the air above the surface of the wine. It is, of course, reusable.  The Globe and Mail has more.

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Swirls: Cork wars, climate change, Wal-Mart wine, China wine

SWIRL: Producers of cork (the genuine thing) are fighting back as they lose market share to screw caps and a variety of synthetic closures.  A new advertising campaign by 100PercentCork.org, reported on by the Huffington Post, argues that cork is better for the environment and, perhaps just as importantly to some, will help you get where you want to go, so to speak, on a date. At least that’s the premise of  “First Date,” a  hilarious video created by the campaign.

SWIRL: There’s new evidence of the growing impact of climate change on the world’s vineyards in an excellent article by AFP that focuses on France. Says one researcher, "Overall, we are seeing a rise in alcohol content and a drop in acidity. That's a problem.” The head of a large French wine trade organization says, “We are seeing for the first time bird species from north Africa. In the vineyards, new types of weeds are growing even as others disappear.” Read the full article here. And for more on climate change and wine see my interview with a leading American researcher.

SWIRL: Pennsylvania’s Liquor Control Board, which oversees the state’s alcohol business, has given Wal-Mart approval to put wine kiosks in seven of its stores across the state. And yes, they will include the same strict controls announced when the kiosks started appearing in Pennsylvania grocery stores earlier this year, including facing a camera, showing an ID and breathing into a Breathalyzer so a state employee monitoring it all can approve the sale. One user reading about it on The Consumerist asks, “Why does PA have to be so weird?” Read more here.

SWIRL: NPR takes note of China’s “meteoric rise” as a player in the high-end wine market. And it’s not only the Lafites of the world that are cashing in. The owner of one more down-to-earth Bordeaux property says “China is the salvation of our chateau.  Six years ago we had no sales in Asia. Now, China and the rest of Asia make up 30 percent of our sales.” Read and listen to the full story here.

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Swirls: A cork alternative (and it’s made of cork)

It’s called the DIAM, and although I’m certain that I have pulled it out of numerous wine bottles, I hadn’t heard it described since a  French winemaker told me about it last night. But first, a little background. 

By now,  alternatives to cork are very much in the mainstream of winemaking. The biggest revolution has been the increasing popularity of screw caps. Randall Grahm, the founder of California’s Bonny Doon Vineyard, has used them for years on all his wines, including his signature red, Le Cigare Volant, and white, Le Cigare Blanc; overall, they have gained broader acceptance for white-wine use than for reds, although many producers in Australia and New Zealand are using them for both.

Alternatively, plastic closures have captured a piece of the market, mainly for inexpensive wines intended for quick drinking. Some still question the ability of the new closures to permit long-term wine aging because they allow less air to enter the bottles. One of the leading reasons the industry has turned to them, of course, is the fact that a small but annoying percentage of natural corks are tainted with TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole), a compound that “taints” the wine and infuses it with a musty off-smell that is often described as resembling a damp cellar or wet newspapers or cardboard.

That said, there those who still refuse to part with the cork, including most French winemakers. “I’m against plastic, I’m against screw caps,” Pascal Guilbaud, owner of Guilbaud Frères, a producer of Muscadet in France’s Loire Valley, declared as we sat together at a dinner built around Muscadet last night here in New York (I’ll have more on the wines in a coming post). And then he told me and a colleague, Tyler Colman of Dr. Vino, about the alternative he does use, describing a product that is reconstituted from cork after it is broken apart, heated and purified.

With a little research, I landed on the Web site of the DIAM closure, a so-called “technical cork.” How is it made? At a production facility in Spain, raw cork is cleaned by boiling, then ground into a cork “flour.” These cork granules are then subjected to a process using pressurized carbon dioxide that penetrates and cleans them. The company says this removes 99.8 percent of TCA as well as other harmful compounds that can cause bad aromas. The granules are then re-assembled and baked with a binding

agent “to give each DIAM closure a homogeneous structure and perfect neutrality,” according to the Web site. “This combination allows free expression of the wine's aromas without interfering with its natural development.” In other words, the corks allow the wine to breathe. Dozens of wineries are using DIAM closures in the U.S., France, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Back at our dinner, Pascal Guilbaud said he now swears by the  newfangled corks and hasn’t seen one bottle of his Muscadet tainted by TCA since he started using them. No, he has no use for plastic or screw caps at this point. But with the DIAM closure, aided by a little technology, he can still say he uses corks in his bottles.

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