Film cap's and wine

[EC8010]

Originally posted by SY
The naming of copolymers is fraught with peril; today I placed an order for poly(styrene-isobutylene-butadiene-styrene), which is difficult to say ten times quickly.

Ten times! Once, surely? What on earth is that doing in wine?

[SY]

What on earth is that doing in wine?

Keeping it from falling out of the bottle.

[fdegrove]

Hi,

Keeping it from falling out of the bottle.

Don't they put enough chemicals in there already....?

No offence, SY...

\Frank: having his bottles corked by genuine mummy cotton.

Cheers,

[Magura]

Look at it from the bright side.

A while back they sealed the bottles off with lead...as in Pb, now how do you feel about that?

Magura

[SY]

The level of extractives from a good synthetic cork is about 5 orders of magnitude lower than the level from conventional tree-bark corks. "Natural" is not always better, the curent craze for cotton insulation and paper dielectrics notwithstanding.

A while back they sealed the bottles off with lead

Actually, lead was just used in the decorative capsules, not as a direct seal. Even so, wines got contaminated. Careful drinkers of older wines will carefully wash and wipe off the top of the bottle after removing the capsule and before removing the cork.

We now return you to audio discussions.

[EC8010]

Originally posted by SY
We now return you to audio discussions.

Whinge, whine, gripe. I can't often afford nice port, but there's generally all sorts of rubbish lurking on the tip of the bottle once the lead is removed, and I've always wiped it away. Perhaps I should have washed it. Extensive research (not recent, sadly) suggested that champagne doesn't seem to have the same problem. Plastic corks don't look as nice, but they can't wreck the wine.

I've never understood what happens when wine is "corked" is it purely down to the (wooden) cork, or is it an interaction between the wine and cork?

Just to pretend to keep on-topic:

Polytetrafluoroethylene: Pouilly fumee.
Polystyrene: Graves.
Polypropylene: Antipodean chardonnay.
Polycarbonate: Semillon.
Polyester: Liebfraumilch

[fdegrove]

Hi,

Some big military/aerospace suppliers offer caps with polysulfone (or something phonetically similar) dielectric.
Are those any good?

What wine are they?

Cheers, errr...shouldn't say that now, or should I?

[GRollins]

Did someone mention wine...?
The capsule wasn't decorative, at least not at first. Its purpose was to keep mice from chewing the cork out of the bottle. Lead was used precisely because it is toxic. A mouse might chew through the capsule on one or two bottles, but the lead would eventually poison the little rascal and he would expire before nailing every bottle in the cellar.
Nowadays they're going to aluminum, plastic, or none at all, though you do still find tin foil on the better wines.
Oh, and yes, Mallory did once make 'styrene caps. The last time I checked, the selection had fallen off (presumably due to the scarcity of styrene film), but they were still listed. I've got quite a few of them. They also had a wide selection of other film caps--polyester, polycarbonate, etc.

Grey

[SY]

Someone ought to split this thread, since this mod is too lazy!

Corkiness is a result of a contamination from the cork entering the wine. The most common contaminant is 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, which gives the wine a distinct aroma of wet newspaper or moldy basement. Other taints include geomsin, which smells like dank mushrooms. It's estimated that perhaps 5% of cork finished wines are tainted in such a manner, a horrific failure rate, and a great opportunity for, umm, opportunists like me.

Appearance is a matter of opinion; I think that the corks I invented look quite nice. There are, admittedly, some pretty ugly plastic stoppers out there.

The foils used for Champagnes have normally been thinner and made of things like tin or aluminum. They tend to corrode less because Champagne has less leakage tendency than Port or still wines due to the grossly oversized cork used therein.

Sadly, the materials used in good synthetic corks make lousy capacitors, though dandy wire insulation. And a nice bottle of Côte-Rôtie is the best way I know to enhance the enjoyment of listening to a good audio system.

[till]

give me a cap for south african cabernet sauvignon and one for german Scheurebe.