Let's be clear on this; the purpose of the cork in your bottle of wine is to keep the wine in the condition in which it was made for as long as possible. The cork is a big improvement over previous methods, but it's imperfect. There is the problem of cork taint, which gives the wine an 'off' flavour, and there's the problem of oxidisation, which is allowing air into contact with the wine. If a cork was put into a bottle so as to hermetically seal it, you'd have difficulty getting the cork out, as you'd be pulling against a vacuum.

Plastic corks suffer from much the same problem, although shrinkage isn't one of them and neither is taint. Yet there is another closure which works very well, but which has yet to catch the public imagination. The problem is this; think of a romantic candle-lit dinner, a tête-à-tête with your beloved, a bottle of wine that you've left to chambre, and now it's time to unscrew the top. See what I mean? Somewhere in the act of unscrewing the top, the magic of the ceremony is lost.

But what is more important, the show or the quality of the wine? Returned bottles with taint of some kind are between 3% and 5% of total sales. Apart from the cost to the trade, the problem for the wine-maker is that if the consumer has had a bad bottle, it may not be recognised as taint and the wine might be thought of as bad and never bought again. That's the cost we pay using corks. But in pubs across the country and in aeroplanes we happily unscrew quarter bottles. Ask yourself when you last tasted a quarter bottle with 'off' flavours. You may not have had a great wine, but it was almost certainly just as its maker intended.

The wine trade is still trying to pluck up the courage to try this closure out on you, sure that it's going to meet with consumer reluctance. Perhaps if a clever designer got to work it could be made to look more acceptable - after all, the tops of quarter bottles of champagne look well enough. It's definitely an improvement on the crown caps that you used to find on bottles of Nicolas table wines and still occasionally on the continent for table wines. The most likely scenario is that you'll find screw caps creeping onto the market, slowly working their way up the price brackets. You'll probably never see Chateau Latour with a screw cap, but if some producers have their way it's possible that a few years from now we'll consign our corkscrews to the bin.

Wine of the Week

Drostdy-Hof Chardonnay ¼ bottle

Despite the fact that publicans like to keep all quarter bottles at the same price, some are better than others. This one is a good wine from South Africa, fresh in taste and easy drinking.
Available in many pubs, price around £3.