The long and the short on corks

Let me open this piece by making it perfectly clear that this is NOT the umpteenth “CORK VS. SCREWCAP” debate (not there’s anything WRONG with that…). No, this is a little number about judging a wine by its cork…

Well, I guess that it’s not strictly a “judging” scenario, but rather one of gleaning information…The next time you open a bottle of wine (and hopefully it’s today!) pay a little extra attention to the cork. One of the easiest things to note about a wine’s cork is its length. Some may say: “Big whoop - this one’s short and this one’s long, and this one measures somewhere in between - they all do the same job.” This is true, but without even putting a drop of wine to your lips, you can often get SOME idea of what the winemakers intentions are (or were) for this bottle. If the cork is short, one can be reasonably sure that the winemaker intends or expects that the wine be consumed sooner rather than later. Why? Well, as is almost too obvious to even note, corks keep air out of wine bottles. If a cork is short, there is that many fewer millimeters of neck/cork contact. And as we all know, eventually, EVERY cork degrades and ultimately fails, but shorter corks make it just that much easier for air to meet wine, ergo you’re probably dealing with a wine that was intended to be drunk young. Concomitantly, if one encounters a particularly long cork, one can be just as sure that the winemaker expected this particular wine to have a chance at a long life.

Another thing to note about corks is quality. The ultimate quality of a cork can play into cork length, but this aspect is another indicator of what the winery thinks that they’ve put into the bottle. A very dense, smooth cork is generally of higher quality than one that is more spongey and covered with pits or “eyes” (the former is more resistant to expansion and contraction). But there also needs to be a stronger caveat regarding this aspect too, and this is where it dovetails with cork length. For example, a winemaker might choose a long, but lesser quality cork over a shorter, but higher quality one for reasons that involve both wine preservation and the winemaker’s ultimate budget. He or she may feel that if the prices of these two cork styles are equal, that one or the other is more approriate for this or that particualr wine, and depending on just how good and just how long the corks actually are can give the drinker a keyhole view into the winemaker’s mind.

The last, and perhaps the least important but still informative aspect of the cork is what it “says” or what is printed thereon. Now clearly, this aspect has little to no effect on how the wine ages, but it DOES tell you a little bit about what the winery or the winemaker thinks of it/himself, and where it thinks it’s going. I’ve pulled plenty of corks that have precisely NOTHING printed on them. Some corks have a generic message for the drinker - “Mis en bouteille au chateau” (”estate bottled”) is a common French message. “Vini di qualita`” (”wines of quality”) is a frequently encountered Italian printing. Still other producers pay the extra scratch to have their names, logos, and even some bons mots, special symbols, sketches, the vintage, etc., etc. printed onto the corks. Now clearly, it’s harder to actually QUANTIFY just what all of these inclusions and omissions mean vis a` vis what’s in the bottle, but it can provide the base for a bit of educated speculation…

As is true with every pursuit, the more examples of “X” that one has seen, the more one can begin to classify and differentiate just what’s afoot, so don’t get too discouraged if at first you can’t tell “long” from “short”, or “good quality” from “bad quality”, but as you continue to drink wine, and notice exactly what’s emerging from the necks of the bottles that you’re drinking - both familiar and unfamiliar - the more you can “read between the lines” and consequently begin to have fun guessing what this or that bottle holds in store before drop one evn hits your tongue…

TOM CIOCCO