Real Or Fake?

For those of you who follow us on WineExpedition.com, you’ll realize that our interest in wine bridges the old with the new. In other words, we like to put a 21st century face on [what could be] the world oldest beverage. We respect the old world tradition while we embrace progress. It’s kind of like baseball in a way. The ballparks and uniforms may be ever-changing but the game is virtually the same as it has been for the past 130 years with the exception of say, the Designated Hitter. Being a baseball purist, I am in no way a fan of the Designated Hitter, and in my opinion, synthetic corks are the DH of the wine world.

To those of you who are advocates of the synthetic cork, allow me to first apologize if I had offended you. It is never our intention to offend anyone here at WineExpedition.com, and please note that we are big fans of several wines that utilize synthetic corks. There is nothing wrong with them, it’s just that we like real corks better. Hey, some people are cat people and some people are dog people.

Without trying to over-romanticize the process, there’s just something special about pulling a real cork from a bottle, especially when it comes from an older bottle. The simple fact is that real cork has character. It’s often marked up, stained and compressed. It’s often chock full of sediment or crystals, and gives off an amazing aroma that you simply cannot duplicate with rubber or plastic. It’s a way to tell the opener that “I’ve suffered for many years so that you can enjoy the wonderful potion that you’re about to ingest”. In a chemical world, real cork is organic. It once grew from the earth just like the fluid that it dams back. It was living once, but proof that its life was not given in vain usually lies in the first sip. We cannot say the same thing about a piece of rubber created in a factory that was probably born about 50 feet from a tire or pencil eraser. I mean, how can you get excited about something with a manufacturers logo embossed on the end? Also, have you ever tried to replace the fake cork if you want to save a little wine for later? You practically need a sledgehammer to get that sucker back in there.

I understand that the argument for synthetic cork is how imperfect real cork can be. I cannot really speak for all of you readers, but we open several bottles here a week, old and new, and I can honestly say that I’ve only come across maybe three “corked” bottles in the past several years. And while real cork may be fallible, in my opinion, it adds to the fragile specialty of the wine it’s holding. The fact that there is a small chance that the wine may have turned makes it all the more exceptional when it is not.  Besides, most wine retailers will refund your money should your purchased bottle be corked.

So the great thing about wine is that it is subjective and I guess the type of material used to cork the wine is just as subjective. Some people might agree with me and some may not. What can I say, the world has become a complicated place when you can’t even agree on the type of way to secure your wine. Let’s agree on one thing though – the day that screw caps replace any type of cork is the day before the apocalypse.