Tasted in Préhy with Clotilde Davenne and team, 20 March, 2019. Domaine Clotilde Davenne 3, rue de Chantemerle 89800 Préhy Tel: +33 3 86 41 46 05 www.clotildedavenne.fr My reportage, last year, on the use of DIAM seals – particularly for their (apparent) ability to ward off not just ‘off’ aromas and flavours, but also…
There are 3 responses to “10 vintages of screw-caps – with Clotilde Davenne”
It even looks like the expertise in applying screwcaps may have advanced over time as there appears to have been a surge over cork from at least 2008 vintage. Don’t forget to count the financial and reputational cost of those corked bottles in the overall impact, notwithstanding that it’s a bottle v. bottle comparison.
I would suspect that there are more than a few throughout France that have been trialling screwcaps for some time. It was as recently as the 2004 vintage that Tyrrell’s and McWilliams switched over here in Oz. Following in the footsteps of our forward thinking riesling producers from the late ’90s.
For maximum enjoyment of a sound old bottle, you prefer it to develop beneath a natural cork, not a screwcap. Conversely, for maximum enjoyment of a sound young wine you prefer it to be under a screwcap rather than cork. This is contrary to what I would have hypothesized.
This experiment also indicates the biggest threat to the natural cork-stoppered bottles is TCA, not oxidation. No such threat to the screwcap bottles.
Being a conservative fellow, I would therefore prefer to buy my whites for both early and later consumption with screwcap. However, I want my friends to buy their whites with corks and to always have a bottle in reserve.
Class!
Great work Bill. I have many friends who have stopped buying White Burgundy because of cork issues. A good cork is fantastic but the problem relates to the have variability of a sub 1 euro natural product inducing such massive change to very expensive wine.