Corked

The Nashville City Paper has an interesting column up about cork taint.

The author's main complaint is that the vast majority of wines on the market — particularly the budget wines — would do well to consider entering the screw-top world instead of hanging on stubbornly to the notion that serious wines have corks.

If winemakers and wineries would do what seems obvious to me and change to alternative closures for almost all white wine, all rose, most merlots, most pinot noirs, all gamays, most shiraz, etc., the quality of the cork would improve so much that this problem would disappear. So, the next time a wine merchant or wine steward offers you a bottle of wine with a screw cap, don’t turn up your nose!

I couldn't agree more. I've had bad cork experiences only a few times, but each time, it's profoundly annoying.

Sure, some of the pomp and circumstance is lost when you remove the corkscrew from the equation, but there's not a lot of pomp involved in a $9 bottle of California drunk swill anyway, is there?