The Man from Mosel River

Book cover

Recently, I finished reading the above book by George W. Taber. It is an excellent work. I was amazaed that one could write so much about the different aspects of this little think: the stopper in a bottle. Nowadays, quite a few different materials and techniques are available and every poor vintner needs to make up his mind what to chose.

At Two Hills Vineyard we went for the DIAM solution (technical cork) for our Merlot wines. Our German customers want a cork to pull and DIAM has never let us down. We have experimented with other corks but found that DIAM suits us best.

Moreover, I hate plastic. It does not do the job. I love glass. It is elegant and suggests superior quality of the wine because of its high price. In Australia screw caps are very widespreach. Almost 100% of white wines and maybe 80 % of all bottles are now under screw caps.

I learned from “To cork or not to cork”, that the last word is not yet spoken. It will be interesting to see how wine ages under screw cap and glass stoppers. If we make white wine again, I would chose screw caps for our Sauvignon Blanc, but maybe DIAM for Chardonnay. Our Merlot will definetely stay under DIAM. For Pinot Noir I would remain undecided. Hmm, I wonder what would be the best solution?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 10th, 2010 at 5:26 pm and is filed under culture, vineyard management, vineyards, wineries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.