It's a story that made a lasting impression on me. My father had met a wine-maker from Montalcino who made Brunello, one the greatest and most expensive Italian red wines. Enthused by the prospect of good wine he set off by car to buy some, a round trip of around 1,000 kilometres from our house. He bought two 50 litre demijohns and brought them home safely, where his next task was to bottle the wine. He went down to our local hardware store and bought whatever corks they had in stock, then he set about decanting the wine into bottles and corked them.

For the first year we drank some wonderful Brunello, but during the second year the quality started to deteriorate quickly. Some bottles that we opened were almost undrinkable, and by the end of year two, wine that should have been good for twenty years, was effectively dead. Why? Because cheap third-grade corks are no use for long-term storage of good wine. This was nearly thirty years ago, but the up-side of the story is that I'm still using wonderful vinegar, that at thirty years of age is as balsamic as any I've tasted.

Since Roman times wine had always been stored in barrels - bottles were used as carafes, but not for storing wine. It wasn't until the late 17th century that it was discovered that wine in a bottle, well-stoppered with a cork, aged differently and kept longer than wine stored in barrels. Wine in a barrel tended to go off once the barrel had been broached, but wine aged in a corked bottle acquired what we now call a 'bouquet'. By the mid-nineteenth century the use of cork was almost universal and the fashion developed for aged red wines, the first wine to benefit from this innovation being port.

Recently plastic corks have been making their way onto the market. They have a similar consistency to real cork, but being non-organic they aren't subject to the fault of imparting 'off' tastes to the wine. It's perhaps too soon to know whether good wines will age better or worse than with the traditional organic product, but their increasing use for wines designed to be drunk young is taking some of the pressure off the cork industry, making it a little easier for great wines to obtain the high quality corks that they need.

Wine of the Week.

Brunello di Montalcino 1994, Castellani

I picked this big-bodied red as a tribute to my father's bottling skills. There are a dozen or so producers of Brunello, from the very prestigious Biondi Santi to lesser examples. Castellani is a good representative of the mid-range, and is priced accordingly. A good wine for red meat roasts.

Available McCabes & Berry Bros., RRP £25