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Mike visits Christopher Vandendriessche, winemaker for White Rock Vineyards in Napa, to get his take on the "screw cap vs. cork" debate.
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You're watching Screw It on SuppleWine. I'm your host, Mike Supple.

On a recent trip to White Rock Vineyards in Napa Valley I noticed they used natural cork to bottle all of their wines. I met with their winemaker and asked him why they use natural cork. He actually had a pretty interesting take on the debate between natural corks and screw caps. So I figured it was my duty to let you know his side of the story.

Mike: Do you use natural corks for all of your wines?

Christopher Vandendriessche: Yeah.

Mike: Any particular reason?

Christopher: With the kind of quality control that I can do with my cork company I can keep my cork taint down to extremely low levels. I've only had one corked bottle out of a thousand cases of Laureate yet.

Cork is still the best. It's the best for long term storage. It has just the right amount of oxygen availability to age the wine properly. All the plastic corks just fail miserably that way. And the screw caps, they work fine in a laboratory setting, but as soon as you start stacking boxes on top of boxes the extra weight of a box on top of a box messes up the screw caps below it. And they find that if you take a palette with seven layers of boxes and measure the oxygen uptake of the bottles on each layer it's the lowest on top and goes up and goes up and goes up, meaning that those wines are aging prematurely on the bottom. So we're not interested in doing it that way.

I go down to the actual factory and check out the boxes of corks that I'm going to buy. I stick my hand in and take out about 50 corks per box and get them analyzed and do my own sensory analysis. Not only does that mean that I'm not going to be buying any bad boxes, but it also means the cork company knows that I'm going to do that, so they don't even point me to the bad ones.

They know - just like people that make bad wine - they know it's bad. They count on you not knowing the difference.