If you're looking for a nice bottle of chardonnay to have with dinner tonight and you find a bottle from 2002 in the back of your closet…you might notice it's pretty brown.
"That's because a little bit of air has been coming through the cork for those last 10 years and gradually the wine has gotten oxidized."
Andrew Waterhouse is a UC Davis wine chemist. He's leading a
study that involves 600 bottles of white wine sealed with either
natural cork, a screw cap or synthetic cork.
Waterhouse says the goal is to find out whether the bottles
might be getting a lot more or less oxygen…and aging at different
rates as a result.
"We want to see for each type of closure, is their
performance consistent enough that wine, say sealed with that
closure, always tastes the same."
He says the results should help winemakers by determining how
consistent each type of seal is.
The PlumpJack Group of wineries is helping to pay for the
research.