[文摘]A CORKING TALE OF THE WINE-STOPPER WARS

烟雨未落

In the 1990s, I went to take a look at Amorim(阿莫里姆) in Portugal(葡萄牙), the world's pre-eminent(卓著的) cork(软木塞) supplier. On the way to one of their cork processing plants(加工厂), my host(东道主) anxiously discussed the weather reports in Europe's wine regions(产地). Spring frosts(霜冻) and unsettled(善变的) weather in June, when the vines(葡萄藤) flower, can seriously reduce the number of grapes, thereby(从而) having a direct effect on the number of corks needed the following year. Wine bottle stoppers(销售额) account for(占) 70 per cent of the value of cork producers' sales. The cork industry and the wine business are symbiotically(共生共存地) linked – which is why it is so extraordinary(非同寻常的) that there has traditionally(素来) been such a gulf(鸿沟) between them.

At a restaurant later that day, my host clearly had remarkably(显然) little notion(概念) of what to order from the wine list. Unlike wine glass(酒杯) manufacturers and designers, cork producers have rarely been seen on the international wine scene(盛会). But most extraordinarily of all, cork producers spent almost two decades up to 2000 in denial (否认)about a cork scourge(指责) that fatally(致命地) tainted(污染) a substantial proportion(大部分) of the wine it stoppered.

  j3 y# [% @( E3 uThe offending compound(化学成分) TCA(氯苯甲醚), so strong that one teaspoon would be enough to contaminate(污染) Lake Constance(康士坦茨湖), was first identified(发现) by a Swiss(瑞典) scientist in 1981. Hans Tanner(汉斯.坦纳) discovered that powerful concentrations of this chlorine-related compound(含氯成分的) were present in all the undrinkably musty(霉味), mouldy-smelling wines rejected as being “corked”. In his very first paper on the subject, he suggested that this could well be due to the chlorine (氯)then widely used by cork manufacturers to bleach(漂白) corks and make them look higher quality. This indeed proved to be the case but the cork industry refused to believe it until 2000 when a young Frenchman working in a private lab in Napa Valley
  H' t- \6 N# E. O2 A(纳帕谷) came up with a reliable way of measuring TCA levels in corks, thereby proving that at least 30 per cent of those being shipped to American wine producers then were tainted with perceptible(可察觉的) levels of TCA.
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4 `+ x/ F9 a& Q9 eGeorge M Taber(乔治.M.泰伯), author of The Judgment of Paris(《1976巴黎品酒会》), the highly regarded book about the famous 1976 France v California taste-off(对决), has written the tale of the wine-stopper battle in the well-paced To Cork or Not To Cork(要不要软木塞?) . There are none of the “he gazed out at a wintry sky” embellishments(修饰手法) that can blight these supposedly non-fictional(非虚构) accounts, just the surprisingly gripping story of the conflict(冲突) between increasingly frustrated(挫败) wine producers, an obdurate(顽固的) cork industry, some truly obfuscating(令人不解地) public relations activity and supporters of various alternative bottle stoppers.
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0 f% H8 j; e" w; KSuch is the intensity of the holy war between screwcap and natural cork factions that, as Taber chronicles, it precipitated the resignation this year of the British wine trade weekly's editor, has led to absurd claims that the rise of screwcaps was a threat to Iberian eagles, which nest in cork forests, and has even provoked an intervention from Prince Charles arguing the case for natural corks on environmental grounds, although the prince, as Taber points out, “may never personally have pulled a cork in his life”.

1 M- I/ ?: I$ ]$ B, c" \) H& pThe book is admirably thorough, chronicling the dotcom-like rise of the plastic SupremeCorq (British supermarkets played a key role) and the (largely French) screwcap's progress to its current position over the bottlenecks of 95 per cent of all New Zealand wine and 50 per cent of all Australian wine. The screwcap has yet to make a serious impact in France and hardly any in the US, where plastic corks are much more popular, even though the screwcap was invented in New York in the late 19th century
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7 u2 m/ k! v1 R! Y3 Q: zWhen faced with what to wine producers and wine drinkers seemed irrefutable evidence of an increase in TCA-tainted wines from the 1980s, the cork industry argued that the fault lay not with the corks themselves but with wine producers who had mistreated their corks. It is certainly true that cork was not the culprit for all TCA infections. Bordeaux wine researcher Pascal Chatonnet, profiled on these pages some years ago, specialises in the analysis of TCA and similar winery infections that come not from corks but from the likes of the chlorine once routinely used to sterilise winery equipment and from a particular wood treatment. His company Excell has made a speciality of discreet analysis and disinfection in properties such as, most famously, Ch?teaux Ducru-Beaucaillou, Canon and Latour, each of whose wine cellars has been completely reconstructed since troubles in the 1980s. Taber suggests why such problems were initially overlooked by the wine producers themselves. “TCA causes anosmia, the temporary lack of smell,” he writes. Because of this, some producers did not even know they had a problem with it.
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In February 2000, Antonio Amorim flew out to Australia with the top-flight scientist Miguel Cabral he had at last hired to try to sort out the TCA problem. They had a meeting with six of the harshest critics of corks from the wine industry (the Australians had long suspected they had been fobbed off with the poorest quality corks because they were so far away from Portugal). Over dinner in an Adelaide hotel, the Portuguese visitors had to withstand more than four and half hours of sustained attack, relieved only when Amorim took a sip of the local water and was able to point out that it was contaminated by TCA too. On the way out of the restaurant, Taber relates, Amorim whispered to Cabral: “I don't ever want to go through a meeting like that again in my life. I don't care what it costs – just fix this problem!”
$ f' ?- l. l7 R: w! g2 lWe have a lot to thank the Australians, and Eric Hervé who developed the TCA-testing procedure, for. Since then, the old habit of drying cork bark on the damp ground, encouraging all sorts of moulds, has been abandoned by the bigger cork producers, and Cabral has come up with a way of using steam to reduce dramatically TCA levels in Amorim's corks. The cork industry is busy inventing new stoppers such as Diam, the successor of the ill-fated Altec, a fusion of organic cork particles and synthetic polymers, that went from zero to sales of 2.5bn stoppers in less than five years (it developed taint in the end too, thanks to the glue used to bind its cork granules). Today, of the 20bn wine bottle stoppers used each year, 16bn are natural cork in some form, 2.5bn are the plastic corks that are being improved but still don't offer a perfect seal over long periods, and just 1.5bn, but growing fastest, are the hotly defended screwcaps.
Taber covers the screwcap-related problems of reduction (bad egg smells) associated with screwcap liners and the possible downside of the copper fining used to avoid the smells. He also mentions the screwcaps' less robust qualities during transport. While utterly fair in his treatment of the bottle stopper options, he, like me, feels a tendresse for natural cork but is delighted that it no longer enjoys an ill-deserved monopoly on keeping the air out and the wine in.
‘To Cork or Not To Cork', Scribner $26
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