The cellar is where the wine quality originates, but it is maintained or ruined by what is used for the bottle closure. The majority of packaging discussions in the wine industry typically begin with labels and glass weight. However, this is not the correct starting point.
The Closure Controls the Wine’s Future
Once a bottle is sealed, the closure is the only thing that can still influence the wine within. Oxygen Transmission Rate, a.k.a. the amount of oxygen that can touch your bottled wine, is what keeps a delicate aged Riesling or a fresh-and-fruity unoaked Chardonnay from rapidly losing their noses after a year in the marketplace. It’s what can protect a juicy red blend from spoilage when a minor flaw occurs in the bottling line.
The wrong closure can either asphyxiate your wine under sulfur causing reductive notes, or allow too much oxygen in and prematurely age or even kill it. Just like a screwcap could be a disaster on a long-term ager you were expecting to age under cork, or one that needed a decade to soften. Or a cork popping its contents all over your face during a hot summer shipment, destroying the wine inside.
The better closure producers use science and technology to ensure they’re looking out for your wines and your brand. This is true whether it’s the avoidance of screwcap reduction, effective sulfur gas penetration-blocking in the most sensitive wines when using screwcaps, or the near-elimination of risk due to leaking or TCA. A simple, price-only decision in closure supply that ignores a wine’s particular needs, including its ideal exposure over time to oxygen, is likely to be a decision that comes back to haunt you.
Your Supplier’s Testing Standards Are Your Quality Standards
Procurement teams tend to measure closures based on unit cost and lead time. These two measurements are important, but they cannot ensure that the closures meet the technical specifications that were finalized during the design phase of your product.
Suppliers that have the ability to verify TCA, like using SPME gas chromatography, an ultra-sensitive method capable of pinpointing contamination at parts per trillion, and share actual, documented OTR data that’s assigned by each lot not just the product category, can assure you that you are receiving what you paid for when you are looking for wine corks for sale.
Bottling line performance must also be considered. For instance, a compressing cork that doesn’t insert easily can grind your line to a halt and lead to leakers that trigger premature oxidation a few weeks after the product has left your facility. That’s a quality control issue that starts with procurement.
Consistency is What Separates Good Batches From Reliable Brands
Brand equity is not created by the occasional great bottle. It is created by the expectation that every bottle will be great. Micro-agglomerated corks have advanced that expectation by leaps and bounds and continue to do so. By nature of their production being untethered to the shape of the cork tree these technical closures have OTR profiles that are orders of magnitude more predictable than natural corks.
Add to that the fact that they give every appearance of ringing the credibility meter since they are almost exclusively composed of nature derived material and you have a one-two punch of having zero-to-negligible TCA and being as predicted by nature as possible. Ideal for high-volume producers who can’t, in a practical sense, have someone manually inspect every closure that goes into the thousands or millions of bottles of wine they release each year.
Sustainability Isn’t Separate From Packaging Strategy
Natural cork is one of the most environmentally friendly products available on the market, from any industry. Traditional, natural cork stoppers are biodegradable, recyclable, and renewable. In fact, the same cork oak tree can be harvested every nine years for generations. In addition, the production of natural cork stoppers is considered low carbon and have a much lower carbon footprint compared to alternative closures.
Likewise, natural cork contributes to the maintenance of the world’s biodiversity, since the cork oak forests in the Western Mediterranean basin are a haven for least 135 plant and animal species that depend on the cork oak forest for their livelihood and are considered endangered. Hence, by choosing natural, you not only make a sustainable decision but you contribute to the environment protection and the maintenance of the ecological environment.
Packaging Protects What Winemaking Created
An inadequately sealed bottle doesn’t only let the wine go to waste, but also all the decisions taken before it. The vineyard management, the fermentation processes, the oak storage, the blending process. The wrong closure choice can delete everything before the end consumer even has the chance to judge any of it.
If winery owners view closures as a mere product purchase, they are exposing themselves to risks that could be easily avoided. The sensory properties that identify a wine’s taste can be lost if the protection is not adequate. This is exactly why the winemaking team should take part in the closure selection, and not only the procurement department, and the same technical standards should be applied as in the selection of any other product.
Nice packaging might sell a bottle of wine but protection will sell a second one.
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Paul Jeff is a passionate writer From Charlotte, North Carolina. He Loves to write on FintechZoom, Marketing Stocks and it’s future prospective.