Hi Larry,
Did not mean to ignore your question, but the answer to Mitch was already too long for one post. When I taste screwcapped samples, I routinely decant them for up to an hour to allow some aspects of the reduction elements to blow off, if there are any present in the aromatics of flavors. Since I am generally tasting new releases sealed under screwcap, this element of reduction is not usually a major factor when I am tasting the wines, as they are often close enough to their bottling to not have been dramatically affected at this point. When I do hit one that is getting a tad “stinky”, I will decant it and eventually add a penny that still has some copper in the composition to clean the wine up in the glass, which it generally does briskly (adding my own heavy metal instead of letting the winemaker do it- very hands on of me).
IME, I find a lot more wines that are affected by early reduction under screwcap showing this issue on the palate, by generating a sense of “metallic minerality” (for lack of a better term), pinched fruit impressions on the palate, and generally very short finishes. As the statistics I have seen for most wines sealed under screwcap are that they are often consumed within 18 months of bottling, I suspect that this is a much more frequent reductive characteristic encountered by casual wine drinkers, rather than the more advanced aromatic elements of rotting cabage, burnt rubber or struck matchstick that in my experience tend to show up a bit later on in the cycle. I have never kept any log on these wines to try and quantify my experiences, so this is simply anedoctal, and I do not have a single bottle in my personal cellar that is sealed under screwcap, so I cannot comment at all on how reduction trends over many years of bottle age for these wines.
I should note that I have absolutely no beef with screwcaps as a wine closure as they were presented to the trade at the outset- though even at that time I always wondered about their applicability for wines meant for long-term cellaring, which happen to be the vast, vast majority of wines in my own personal cellar. But where I take exception with is how the screwcap industry and its proponents have reacted to the issue of reduction, which no one anticipated (as far as I know) when the closures first began to be adopted in large numbers, but which has been pretty seriously documented for the last four or five years. IMO, denial, slipshod science and character assisination seems to have been the most often utilized responses-on the surface- for proponents of screwcaps to the issue of reduction (not always from people with overt ties to the manufacturers mind you, but often wine people who had staked their reputations on what they had been told out of the blocks about this closure and did not see any way to extricate themselves without dramatic reversals of position, or this is at least how it seemed to me).
The steps described in the previous post certainly seem to be the responses behind the scenes that were advocated. While I fully understand the potential liability issues involved here, in my opinion the industry response has still been pretty ethically dubious- at least when it comes to the addition of copper and potentially cyanide to the wine. One can easily imagine a much more proactive response that could have minimized the potential damage of several follow-on vintages, once the research became clear about tendency to permanent reduction of wines sealed under completely anaerobic conditions, but it is my distinct impression that misdirection, mud-slinging and highly questionable “wine preparation techniques pre-bottling” were the industry’s general response to the issue of problematic wine evolution under screwcap. So on that level I am certainly not impressed by the vocal proponents of the closure.
Of course all of this discussion is predicated on how screwcaps currently perform as a wine closure, and I have already seen some evidence that the industry is making dramatic headway with creating closures that allow a certain amount of oxygen ingress, which if successful should solve the issue of potential reduction. This is of course good news, but does this absolve them of what in to my mind is their failure to forthrightly address the issue of reduction in the first place when the evidence first began to pile up? In my opinion the track record to date has been less than exemplary on this score, and I do not see a whole lot of incentive (except of coure money, as screwcaps are decidedly cheaper than corks) on the part of winemakers to continue to champion this closure system and its industry, when it has been my impression that they have been a little slow to fess up in the first place. But I am just a lowly wine writer, and there may well be issues in this equation that I am completely unaware of and would be delighted to learn more about. For it seems to me that on this issue, the more transparency and dialogue that are involved, the more likely it is that we will not end up ill from heavy metals or something worse in the wines. In this respect, the FDA’s complete inattention and continuing lack of overt action has been one of the most egregious part of the entire episode, which certainly on the surface looks to be protection of the industry at the expense of potential adverse health affects on the consumer- in my opinion of course.
Best Regards,
John