First the screwcap, now let’s see how the crown seal goes…
Australian wineries, the first in the world to adopt screwcap seals to any significant degree with still table wine, are again at the innovative forefront with sparkling wine. Led by two of Australia’s leading sparkling makers, Domaine Chandon and Seppelt, the latest innovation is the crown seal, a device more closely associated with beer than wine. It made its debut in 2004 with Chandon’s 2000 Vintage ZD Zero Dosage and then with Seppelt’s flagship release of its 1994 Show Sparkling Shiraz.
The crown seal represents a valid effort to eliminate two of the bugbears associated with sparkling wine: cork taint and the bottle variation due to random oxidation. Because it’s so closely linked with the image of beer, the crown seal will face an even greater challenge for broad-scale acceptance than the screwcap for still wine. And, as we are reminded at the conclusion of every significant event in motor sport, there is a certain raw-edged association between the explosion of a cork, the expulsion of frothing wine and the very essence of Champagne.
Leaving alone the poorly-known medical fact that this indeed a frankly dangerous custom since the cork of a champagne bottle can easily displace a human eye, about which it is roughly the same size, the cork, the pop and the fizz are to many people integral to the pleasure of sparkling wine.
At this stage, it’s worth noting a simple fact about the origins of the crown seal. It was in fact developed in Champagne by the wine industry for the wine industry. Take a look at the rounded rim of all but the rarest bottles of Champagne; they’re tailor-made for a crown seal to fit.
After a base wine is liqueured with yeast and sugar to produce the carbon dioxide-derived effervescence associated with Champagne, it’s then capped with a crown seal. Thus it remains for a minimum of fifteen months in Champagne, and for many years for the rarest and finest releases. The crown seal is only removed during disgorging, when the yeast is expelled from the bottle. Only then is a cork applied.
There are significant differences between the corks used for still and sparkling wine. Instead of being a single piece of bark, as they are for still wines, sparkling corks comprise two or three discs of natural bark, plus a lump of agglomerate cork, each of which is glued together. In theory, the wine is never meant to make contact with the agglomerate component, but in my experience it frequently does. Anecdotally, I experience significantly more cork taint and bottle variation with sparkling than with still wine.
So the companies like Domaine Chandon and Seppelt are simply reverting to the same proven seal for the finished package as they and virtually all other makers of the kind used during the production and maturation process.
John Harris is the senior sparkling winemaker at Victoria’s Domaine Chandon, whose ZD zero dosage sparkling wine was the first released with a crown seal attached to the finished product. ‘While the trade and the media have embraced the idea, some consumers are indeed a little more reticent’, he says. ‘But for the same reason that Stelvin a popular form of screwcap is successful, you can argue the same case for the crown seal.’
‘We’re also confident because our sparkling wines spend most of their lives under crown seals, and in some ways it’s a little foolish to take them out of the seal and jam a little bit of bark in at the top. Not only have we not received a single incidence of failure in two years with this seal, but they are preserving freshness for longer and causing far less bottle variation.’
Buoyed by the success of the seal, Domaine Chandon is now introducing it to its limited cellar door releases such as the Tasmanian Cuv
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