Why does the wine waiter first invite his client to taste a little drop of the selected wine? So that the client can be sure that the wine does not have that bitter, stale taste that comes from being "corked", something that occurs when excess tannin seeps out of the natural cork stopper rendering the wine undrinkable. Obvious, no?
At that point, of course - especially if English comedian John Cleese is your waiter - there may develop an altercation when the client sends the bottle back and asks for another.
Such scenes, however, could be a thing of the past if the Milan-based Akros company has its way. Akros is engaged in the not insignificant task of persuading Italians that a plastic (high-grade, thermoplastic actually) bottle stopper, called "SupremeCorq" is not merely an adequate substitute for the traditional cork but, in fact, an improvement on it.
Roberto Casini, marketing director for Akros, a rubber and plastics company, is the man engaged in the task of changing the 4,000-year-old wine bottling traditions of Mediterranean man. His sales pitch is simple: no more corked wine. The thermoplastic stopper is simply perfect, or as near to perfect as you get, and does not ruin wines the way cork regularly does.
For the bottom line in the campaign to introduce the plastic stopper inevitably carries a significant financial consideration. Put simply, every year wine producers, retailers, restaurateurs, bar owners and consumers lose thousands of litres of wine because natural cork can contaminate a bottle's contents.
Not only does the cork seep into the wine, giving you a distinctly "off" taste but, more subtly, oxygen trapped in the cork tops after washing can later release itself into the sealed bottle atmosphere, entirely ruining the wine's ageing process and consequently its taste. Anyone can recognise a "corked" wine, but if a wine merely tastes disappointing or less interesting than expected, then that does not always mean that the wine in question is of poor quality. While it may not be "corked", it could still be contaminated by the cork . . . or so goes the sales pitch.
Even though wine producers in Australia, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa and the US have all long since used plastic stoppers, it is clearly no easy matter persuading the Italian wine industry to accept the new stoppers. Not only is the Italian wine industry one of the oldest, it is also the second-largest in the world, producing 50 million hectolitres per year.
"The biggest problem is one of habit and tradition. A wine producer or a restaurateur, he's going to say to me, sure, your stopper could work fine but what am I going to say to my clients when I produce a bottle for them with a plastic stopper? . . . In Italy, people simply associate plastic stoppers with cheap vino di tavola" says Casini. Another problem is that the best Italian wines, those bearing the letters "DOC" (Denominazione di Origine Controllata), are not legally permitted (as illustrated by sub-clauses in the relevant legislation) to use anything other than natural corks for their bottle "closures".
SupremeCorq was developed not in Italy but in Seattle, USA by a company which works in the field of injection-moulded plastics and produces a variety of objects ranging from sports helmets to sunglasses. Vineyards in the US had long used plastic stoppers for their large barrels rather than the traditional wooden bungs. So someone at the company gambled that, if it works for large barrels, why not for bottles?
Casini argues that the plastic stopper has proved superior to natural cork in hundreds of tests, aimed at assessing permeability and compression. SupremeCorq, allegedly, is more than seven times less permeable to oxygen than cork.
Then, too, there is the fact that in the pressurised rush to meet production schedules, some natural cork producers now fell their trees after nine rather than 12 years. The new stopper is opened in exactly the same manner and with the same corkscrew as the traditional cork. For the time being, SupremeCorq has had mixed success in Italy. The good news is that five million bottles from the 1998 harvest, including wines produced by Vinnaioli Jermann in the Friuli-Venezia region and by Avignonesi in Tuscany, are due to be stopped with SupremeCorq. The bad news is that nearly all of these bottles are bound for Australia, Germany, the UK and the US. Persuading Italian man that plastic is best may take some time yet.