If wine were to be erased from human history and 'discovered' now, there are many things the industry would do differently.
We suspect one of them would be the use of cork closures. Cork is an almost magical natural material, but punching a cylinder out of a particularly elastic tree bark to stick in the top of a bottle is unlikely the solution we would land on for closures if it hadn't already been the practice for centuries. However, because humanity has relied on it for so long, we've become accustomed to the way it lets small amounts of oxygen enter the bottle and bring aged characteristics to the wine over a shorter time than might otherwise happen under a more airtight closure. We've also become accustomed to the act of pulling the cork out of the bottle, the sound it makes on release; the theatre of it all.
The wine industry has since come up with 'better' closures, such as screw caps, in the sense that they are a better seal from outside air. But the humble cork is holding on as the favoured closure, particularly in the most traditional 'old world' wine producing regions. In fact, screw caps are often outlawed, for example for all of the Italian DOCG regions we import: Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello and Chianti Classico. There's more than a touch of snobbery in that approach, but there is also something wonderful about maintaining our connection to old ways.
The path to screw caps
You might already be aware that Australia played an outsized role in the adoption and growth of screw cap closures for wine. The screw cap wasn't invented here, it was developed in the 1960s by a French company, but it was at the request of a South Australian winery, Yalumba.
Why was anyone looking to upend centuries of cork closure tradition? Cork-taint. That's the fault in wine, caused when trichloroanisole (or TCA) is produced by fungi in the cork. It smells a bit like wet cardboard, or mouldy newspaper, or our Sydney terrace after we've been away for a few weeks. That smell is what is meant when someone says a wine is 'corked.' Even at lower levels, where it's not obvious on the nose, it can impact the vibrancy of the fruit flavours - dulling them to a less impressive version of the wine than you would have tasted with a better cork.
TCA is also why you might get handed the cork and poured a small amount of wine in your glass at your favourite fine dining spot. That's for you to do your best sniffer dog impression and see if you detect it (not to see if you like the wine).
Side note: There are people who throw the word 'corked' around like confetti for all sorts of unrelated reasons. Old bottle with only tertiary characteristics left? Corked! Left the bottle in the back seat of the car on a 40 degree day? Corked! Cork pieces floating in your wine after a botched attempt at opening? Corked! They can all be problematic, but not in the 'corked' way.
Cork taint was a very common issue around the time the screw cap was developed and all through the end of the 20th century. Australian wineries suspected that they were receiving lower quality corks, making the problem especially pronounced here. Thus, the shift toward screw cap closures, which are never affected by TCA, was somewhat inevitable.
From Australia, to the world. Screw caps now account for roughly a third of wine closures globally, though less prevalent in the old world where tradition has a firm grip on all things wine production.
How wine ages under screw caps compared to cork
Screw caps are essentially an air tight seal, so the maturation in the bottle happens much more slowly than under cork. That's not necessarily a bad thing for ageing a wine. Under screw-cap, the ageing process is much more predictable, with less bottle to bottle variability, but it may mean you need an extra few years (or decades) to reach a similar average level of maturity as the same bottle under cork.
Why we only have a few screw cap closures in our range
Plenty of premium bottles, especially in Australia, are now made under screw-cap, but it's still a rarity at the high end of European wines. That's why in our range it's almost non-existent. Just two of our range use screw cap closures and they are both white wines at the lower price end of our range (though still premium wines by any reasonable standard). They are the 2020 'Signature' blend, and the 2022 Riesling, both from the Kuentz-Bas' La 4ème Tour range. Head winemaker Laure Adam was the only one of our producers to offer us a choice of closure, which she only offers for bottles destined for export markets. We took her up on it because we prefer the fresh style for those wines, and, every now and then, the convenience of a screw cap is just what we need.
On balance, we prefer cork closures for wines we drink. Mostly that's because we enjoy the act of opening them. We only associate it with wine, and so it marks a particular kind of moment. We're also happy to exchange potential variability for years or decades less time in the cellar before we can open an older bottle. It helps that we've had very low instances of 'corked' wine from the Vino Cammino range - but an MW recently suggested to us that she still thinks TCA impacts 1 in 12 bottles under cork, some more noticeably than others.