Long time consumers of my swill, doubtless numbering into the millions, may have noted that I haven't used what are disingenuously known as "natural" corks in quite a while. (I call the people who offer them "mold salesmen.") The last straw on this flying monkey's back was the 20+% TCA rate in the "natural" Suncorks used on my 2000 Jory Winery "Lock Vineyard" Paso Robles Syrah. I have used Neocorks for several years with complete satisfaction. They're the ones that have a foamlike core exposed at either end, and a solid, often colored, on the surface that touches the interior of the bottle's neck. I often put flying Zeppelins on the outside, unless the supplier wants more money for the printing than they do for the corks themselves. Of course, my complete satisfaction is not the wine bartenders, as putting a Neocork back into the bottle is not easy, especially if the wine has been bottled recently. Neocorks cost about the same as inexpensive 'natural' corks.
I'm also a big fan of screwcaps, particularly the 7-layer Alvis type (they have a tin liner on the bottom, as opposed to exposed white foam) though the surface area that's sealed is only that of the very top of the bottle, a narrow ring, which is vulnerable to a blow or a long period of overpressure, such as when pallets of wine are stacked four high. The screwcap/bottle combination costs a bit more than the cork-finished type.
My Stillman wines use Diam "corks" which are made from a very finely ground 'corkburger' that is purged with supercritical CO2 which removes the TCA compounds, and then 'glued' together with some foodie-happy compounds. They work perfectly, though they look cheap. They're not.
The worst closure, in my not so humble opinion, is the so-called 1+1, which consists of visibly irregular small chunks of corkburger, glued together with corkdust, with a thin disk of solid cork at each end. The center sections of these corks very frequently have enough TCA that you can smell it just by breaking the corks open and applying one half-cork to each nostril. The thin discs at each end are usually permeated within a year or so, allowing the TCA in the corkburger to contaminate the wine.
Guess which cork is most commonly used in inexpensive plonk?
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