"The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether. Moons, coins, men." --Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Friday, January 12, 2007
And the answer is: a Zork
Don Sebastiani and Son's wrote a nice response to my post/e-mail below. The thing (the plastic, not-cork) is called a Zork, and though you would never know it from the Zork site, the winery was quite honest about the problems they'd had with the first couple iterations (that bottle we bought was from the first vintage that used the zork). (Mind you this is not a synthetic cork. Those have been around for years and seem to work just fine. This is, well, something else.) Maybe they've got it all worked out now, but all the same, I think I'll give them a few more years. It's like a new model car. Some of the best advice I've heard on that point was that the third year was the right time to buy--all the kinks had been worked out by then. Judging by what the DS&S had to say, I'm thinking it's about the same for new sealing methods in the wine industry.
Here's the winery's actual response
ReplyDeleteThank you for having shared your thoughts with us regarding the LBV Chardonnay. The closure on that bottle is called a Zork, and our experiences with it have not been exactly smooth sailing. The vintage which purchased was one of our first bottlings with the Zork, and more than a few us (customers and employees alike) noticed the problem that you encountered. We checked in with Zork and told them about the problem, they made a few tweaks, we still noticed the problem, so they made a few more. We are now on the fourth iteration of the Zork in our current vintages, and the off-odor issues have finally been resolved. It seems that the Zork was somehow acting as a wick and pulling vapors and then wine up the sides of the bottle and trapping them inside the Zork…once in there, they were spoiling (the vinegar smell), but the wine itself was unaffected.
In any case, we do thank you for your feedback, and appreciate your sentiments. I hope that, the next time you happen upon a Zork-finished bottle, you don’t have nearly as unpleasant an experience.