
Put a cork in it?
“It was my screwy idea,” says Gordon Getty. Depending on which of two wines ― one group sealed with cork, the other with screw caps ― triumphs in our group’s blind tasting at Napa Valley’s PlumpJack Winery, that’s either a confession or a boast.
With the 1997 vintage, San Francisco billionaire Getty and fellow PlumpJack proprietor (and San Francisco mayor) Gavin Newsom committed half of their reserve Cabernet to screw caps.
It was a highly publicized counterstrike against the number of bottles ruined by the bacteria commonly known as TCA, which can grow in cork and give wine a nasty wet-dog smell. (Imagine BMW shipping its cars using technology that destroys 3 to 5 percent of them.)