Why don't you use "natural" corks in your wines?
First of all, because MOLD is SMELLY. More properly, TCA (2,4,6 trichloroanisole) and its friends are, and they have no business around wine. For over twenty years we've heard excuses from the cork industry, and we got tired of them. While some artificial or hybrid corks have proved trouble-free, the best modern screwcaps (such as the Alvis) are the best insurance that our wine will be properly preserved and aged in the bottle. And as far as wine 'breathing' and aging through the minute amount of oxygen that supposedly gets through a 'natural' cork, allow the voice of authority:
Oxygen is not the agent of normal bottle maturation. When a wine ages in the bottle, the oxidation-reduction potential decreases regularly until it reaches a minimum value, depending on how well the bottle is sealed. Reactions that take place in bottled wine do not require oxygen.
- Professor Pascal Ribereau-Gayon, University of Bordeaux.
We're sure it sounds sexier in French, but there you are!
How did Stillman become a winemaker?
Long version: Take the Wayback machine to New York where he was exposed to great Bordeaux as a mere lad, the by-product of a deal between Pepsi and Stolichnaya Vodka that involved a wine distributorship being run by Stillman's father for a year or so. In between dinner parties with KGB agents, young Stillman managed to taste some awesome swill . . . . then fast forward to a late teenage Stillman back in his native California, drinking bottles of Fetzer Gewurztraminer (don't laugh, it was blazingly excellent when they were only making a couple of thousand cases of it) in the parking lot before the show. Several years later, while majoring in Fuzzy Studies at U.C. Berkeley, Stillman started hanging out with infamous winemakers in the Santa Cruz Mountain area during weekends and other vacations, and drifted into the business by osmosis. (Nice joke, eh?) By the time he graduated (to the astonishment of his family, we might add) he had already bought several barrels and launched the fabled Jory Winery, despite having no vineyard or winery. (He still doesn't.) Fortunately, he had a palate and an intuitive sense of winemaking.
Short version: By osmosis. (Ha, ha!) |
