Château Margaux Corks a Problem With a Screw Cap

• By WILL LYONS

Top Bordeaux wine estate, Chateau Margaux, uses the best corks money can buy but a percentage are still faulty. Since 2003 it has been conducting an experiment with synthetic corks and screw caps. WSJ's Will Lyons puts his palate to the test. Photo: Getty

There is one wine fault that even the world's most prestigious estates cannot escape. Despite using the best corks money can buy, there is still no analysis available to detect the unpleasant contamination of cork taint.
A corked bottle of wine is always an irritation, particularly if it is the last from a favored case, a vintage port reserved for a special occasion or if a bottle requires protracted discussions with the sommelier. But where a corked bottle of wine can turn into a catastrophe is when you have paid more than £4,000 for the privilege of tasting it. This is why Château Margaux, one of Bordeaux's top wine estates, is experimenting with a number of closures that could see its Grand Vin bottled under screw caps.
"We all know about the problems of cork and are frustrated with it," says Paul Pontallier, the managing director of Château Margaux. "We have done our best to make it less of a problem, but we cannot pretend we have solved it. It remains unacceptable that we can work so hard to produce great wines and then it can be ruined by the cork."

The problem is the small minority of corks contaminated with TCA, the chemical compound 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole, found naturally in cork, that imparts in the wine an unmistakable pungent, moldy odor. Identifying a corked wine shouldn't be confused with other wine faults, such as bits of cork floating around the glass, which has no effect on the flavor at all, or oxidation, where a small amount of air has seeped through the cork, leaving the wine smelling "sherried."
But corked wine is the most serious as its foul smell leaves the wine undrinkable. So in a bid to find a solution to the problem, Mr. Pontallier says Château Margaux's R&D department began an experiment a little more than 10 years ago, bottling a number of its wines under a variety of closures. The move, even if it was for a trial, proved controversial and when news leaked out of the estate's plans, there was a strong reaction. "We received plenty of mail," says Mr. Pontallier. "Half of them were terrible and asked 'Are you crazy?' The other half congratulated us and said this was the modern way. But we are not afraid of changing, as long as we are sure it is for the better."
Today, the château is still measuring quality. Recently, at a small blind tasting in London, I was fortunate to sample six of the wines under trial. A generic red and white wine from the same vintage were each bottled three different ways—under natural cork and two kinds of screw cap, an air-tight example and a permeable one. Wines bottled under the fourth closure, synthetic corks, were discarded, as, in Mr. Pontallier's words, they were "absolutely catastrophic."
Of the reds, from the 2003 vintage, I immediately favored the third example, which was bottled with an airtight capsule and, to me, tasted more polished and silkier than the previous two. The first wine, bottled with a permeable capsule, had very forward aromatics but also included a strange note that was quite wild, possibly medicinal. The second wine, with a natural cork, was altogether more classic, with a restraint on the nose and more grip on the palate. The majority of participants in the room favored the third example; Margaux disclosed that finding tallied with their research.
The whites I found harder to differentiate. I thought the first wine was fresher with more appeal, No. 2 was a little over the edge, while No. 3 was perhaps less evolved, with more primary fruit aromas. In the room, natural cork was preferred, although I remained undecided.
It was clear from the tasting that for wines one plans to drink in the short term, screw caps offer a reliable alternative to cork, changing the wines' character in mainly positive ways. But for the long term, Mr. Pontallier is still undecided. "The problem is to know about the future evolution," he says. "Our point is to make sure that in 100 years these bottles are fine. There is probably one distance of years where it might work, but on the long term, I really have questions."
I wouldn't be discarding those corkscrews just yet.

Origin information: The Wall Street Journal