When will Australia’s most prestigious wine, Penfolds Grange, adopt the screw cap? It won’t, winemaker Peter Gago told me in Adelaide a few weeks ago. So are we doomed to throwing away the odd, corked $500 bottle forever? Not at all, says Peter.

But we’ll have to wait a little while for his solution. It’s radical and, arguably, made possible by screw cap’s commercial and technical success over the past decade.

The screw cap’s ready adoption broke the cork monopoly. In turn — albeit reluctantly and slowly — sections of the cork industry addressed the systemic, destructive problems of oxidation and cork-taint.

But the by the time Diam (a highly-effective, high-tech composite cork) arrived, masses of drinkers had abandoned the corkscrew forever and other innovative seals had arrived.

In Australia, for example, an Adelaide company developed and released the plastic, pull out Zork plug, while in Worms, Germany, Alcoa commenced manufacture of the elegant, glass Vino-Lok.

In developing the Vino-Lok, Alcoa surely looked to challenge rival aluminium giant, Alcan, owner, through its French subsidiary, Pechiney, of Stelvin, the original screw cap for wine.

And Stelvin is where the screw-cap revolution began. It fizzed for a while in the sixties and seventies, then faltered and faded in the eighties. But it simmered in winemakers’ minds before re-emerging in the late nineties.

The re-emergence in Australia rested on two forces – winemaker dissatisfaction with cork and the marvelous maturity, freshness and consistency of whites, mainly rieslings, that had survived from the short Stelvin boom of the sixties and seventies.

That white wine would not only keep but also mature well under screw cap for decades was proven. And winemakers both here and in New Zealand were aware of trials with reds in France a generation earlier.

Several Australian wineries – including Penfolds and Henschke — began testing the cellarability of reds under screw caps and other seals during the nineties.

Peter Gago says that Penfolds trials included Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz 1996 and Bin 2 Mourvedre 1995. The results were – and continue to be — encouraging. What the trials show conclusively is that a top-notch red like Bin 389 matures exactly as you’d expect it to under a good cork – but without the loss caused by cork taint or oxidation.

It also shows that the seal survives intact for a decade.

A decade on from those trials, many of the top-end Penfolds reds have screw caps – including the recently released $150-a-bottle RWT Barossa Shiraz 2004. But as I’ve wondered before why, with the knowledge and confidence they had, did Penfolds not seize the leadership with screw caps? Instead they seemed to have opted for an equivocal, piecemeal rollout that hardly inspires confidence.

So, if screw cap is better for the other Penfolds reds, why not for Grange?

Well, says Peter Gago, ‘With Grange we’re talking about people cellaring it for thirty to fifty years. We’ve had trials for ten years, but we’ve got our fingers crossed that these wines will still be good in four or five decades. It’s the integrity of the seal, not ageing that’s of concern’.

He explains that while we know that screw cap seals keep white wines perfectly for thirty years, the chemistry of red wine is different and we simply don’t know for certain that the seal will last.

He recalls working with well-known sparkling-wine maker, Ed Carr, at the company’s Nuriootpa sparkling cellars. They observed that crown seals on sparkling red wines often deteriorated where those for sparkling whites didn’t.

Whether or not modern screw caps with their tin coated sealing wads will deteriorate in contact with red wine for fifty years is simply not known. We do know that some corks make the distance and some don’t.

We also know that top Bordeaux Chateau re-cork their museum stock every couple of decades. And Penfolds itself offers free re-corking clinics for customers with reds over fifteen years of age.

So, it might be argued that if screw cap is better than cork for the medium term, why not make the change and offer re-capping clinics? There’d probably be a lot less Grange lost than there is under cork.
But Gago believes the solution for Grange has to better than that, and that ‘it’s an engineering thing, and will be worth the wait’.

And we shouldn’t have to wait too many years for the Gago solution: glass-to-glass. He cites examples of industries containing gas with glass or ceramic valves.

Glass to glass, he says, is the ideal seal as there’s nothing to corrode – no perishable material like cork, the tin-coated wad in screw caps or the silicon ring of Vino-Lok.

He says the company engaged an engineer to develop the idea and already has a prototype – a glass disc held in place with a spring-loaded clamp. Once perfected, says Peter, it can be deployed rapidly.
As long as the mechanism creates the perfect seal – and that can be readily tested – wine maturation trials won’t be necessary. ‘We don’t need any air getting in. There’s enough in there’, says Peter, pointing to the neck of the 2002 Grange.

What’s in all this for the drinker? Well, better seals mean better wine. Winemakers and packaging engineers are at last closing what has been the weakest link in the quality control chain. Bring on the innovations, I say, and throw away the corkscrew.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

Of the notable genius displayed in Australia’s long winemaking history – from Ray Beckwith’s profound scientific insights to the crafting of sublime, long-lived reds by legends like Maurice O’Shea, Colin Preece and Jack Kilgour – the achievements of Grange creator, Max Schubert, soar.

What Max put in place — that O’Shea, Preece, Kilgour and others did not — was a powerful succession structure that guaranteed continuity of the wines he created.

Max became production manager at Penfolds Magill cellars in 1948, made the first Grange in 1951 and ‘retired’ in 1973. But until his death in 1994 he maintained an office at Magill and remained a mentor to Don Ditter and John Duval — his successors from 1973 and 1986 respectively.

Don had worked alongside Max from 1950 until his retirement in 1986. And John Duval worked closely with both Ditter and Schubert prior to taking the reins from Don.

Fortunately the winemaking culture survived the abrupt departure of Duval in 2002 – a consequence of the disastrous Rosemount takeover – with the appointment of Peter Gago, Duval’s experienced offsider, as leader of a well-seasoned winemaking team.

This continuity over a period of more than fifty years means that the Penfolds reds we drink today still bear the Schubert thumbprint of powerful fruit flavours, robust structure and age-worthiness.

The Australian winemaking scene today is unrecognisable from the fortified-driven era in which Max learned his skills. But even among the amazing diversity now available — and amid increasing cries for elegance — Penfolds sturdy reds just about always deliver, especially after a few years’ bottle age.

The Granges, Bin 389s, Bin 28s and so on that we enjoy today, are in many ways different from the ones that Max made. Fruit sourcing has changed over the years as Australian vineyards expanded – especially during the explosive nineties.

And several new labels have appeared, partly as a response to increasing fruit diversity, partly in response to perceived demand and partly through winemaker innovation.

But the deeply layered, complex style is still perceivably Max’s – even in the more elegant styles like Magill Estate Shiraz (for which he hand wrote the first specification in August 1982, nineteen years after retiring), RWT Barossa Valley Shiraz and Bin 128 Coonawarra Shiraz. In each case fruit sourcing ensures elegant flavour and structure, but not at the expense of depth and complexity.

For all of these reasons, the annual release of the Penfolds blue chips presents an opportunity to buy some of Australia’s greatest wines in mint condition.

Those buying as an investment, however, are likely to be disappointed. If you don’t believe this, go to langtons.com.au and compare auction prices for older vintages against retail prices for current vintages. You may be surprised.

Older vintages generally sell at a substantial discount to the new release. This alone might discourage prospective investors. And for drinkers it means that if you want to enjoy Grange in its golden age – 15 to 20 years in my experience – auction is the place to go.

For example, as collectors forked out around $500 a bottle for the new and superb 2002 recently, auction goers collected the equally venerable 1996 and 1991 for just $427 and $405 respectively, or so-called ‘lesser’ vintages like 1989 for $349, 1992 for $279 or 1994 for $266. These prices include the fifteen per cent buyer’s premium and GST paid to the auctioneer.

Auction prices suggest that if you bought Grange at retail price before its mid-nineties internationalisation, you may have been on the money as an investor in the mid and late nineties – but would have seen little, none or negative movement in real terms since.

Langton’s records show a clear pattern of higher prices for the big-reputation vintages. The legendary 1990, for instance, recently sold at a nett $719, more than double the $319 fetched by the 1989 vintage. And 1986, another great vintage, fetched $577 while the 1985 attracted just $254.

What this suggests to me is that if you buy the best vintages as an investment, you may lose less money than if you buy the lesser ones. Or, from a more positive, drinking pleasure perspective, let someone else do the investing and cellaring, then buy up the mature gems at auction.

An important caveat is to check the provenance of wine with the auctioneer prior to bidding. Good cellaring is everything.

From a wine-quality perspective, the recent Penfolds premium releases, including Grange 2002, are exciting by any measure. I recently tasted these with winemaker Peter Gago and even discussed the likely end of cork as a seal for Australia’s flagship red. The Gago solution is unique. Read about it here next week.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007