Opinion: Joelle Thomson

Joelle Thomson

Journalist, wine writer and author joellethomson.com

Homage closes the door on cork

Trinity Hill’s Homage is one of New Zealand’s most collectible wines and, as Joelle Thomson explains, is now even more so since its makers started using a screwcap closure...

MENTION SCREWCAPS to winemakers Damian Fischer and Warren Gibson and both agree it is the best closure for wine – so why is it that their best wine has only now, after 18 years, been sealed with a screwcap? “Frustratingly, I have never had a legitimately good answer,” says Trinity Hill chief winemaker Warren Gibson. “The best responses have been, ‘It’s what the market expects’ or ‘It’s part of the packaging’, but I’ve never really been fully committed to the answer.” Fortunately, he will no longer have to be frustrated, because the new 2018 Trinity Hill Homage – a 100% Syrah wine’s first vintage in 2002. made partly with grapes grown from cuttings brought from Hermitage in France’s Northern Rhone – is sealed with a screwcap, the first time since this top wine’s first vintage in 2002. I have asked Warren about the choice of closure many times over the years, because my own findings of cellaring wine (as well as tasting and drinking it) show that screwcaps provide a far more consistent closure, which allows wine to retain freshness, to taste silkier and smoother in youth and to age more consistently. Screwcaps are the wine industry’s response to major frustrations with cork taint, which reached a crisis point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, particularly in this part of the world. The rising number of wines impacted by poor quality cork around this time led to the initiative to bottle commercial wine under screwcap, a move led by 17 of Australia’s Clare Valley Riesling producers in 2000 and followed by a group of 26 New Zealand wineries in 2001. There was debate initially regarding the suitability of screwcaps to age fullbodied red wines for the long term. Trinity

The new 2018 Trinity Hill Homage is sealed with a screwcap, the first time since this top

Hill began trialling screwcaps on white wines from the 2001 vintage and barrel aged red wines from the 2000 vintage. The immediate goal was to eliminate obvious cork taint issues, but other

closure related problems quickly became apparent, such as oxidation, a general lack of freshness and major variation between bottles.

“We discovered we were

able to use far less sulphur dioxide (SO 2 ) in wines prior to bottling,” explains Gibson. “This became obvious as we trialled

ageing reds in both barrels and tanks without SO 2 additions. This was part of a long-term trial to evaluate whether ageing with no SO 2 helped with colour stability and presenting the tannins and general structure in a more positive way.”

From the 2010 vintage, he and fellow Trinity winemaker Fischer trialled bottling reds under screwcap with what they considered to be low levels of SO 2 . They discovered there was a lot to be gained from ageing and bottling robust red wine styles under screwcap, such as a softer, smoother mouthfeel in the wine. There was also a better expression of colour, an openness on the nose and palate with earlier drinkability, and no negative effects on ageability. There was also the positive of adding less sulphur to the wine. And now it is time to move on, says Gibson who, with Fischer, has happily led the charge to seal Homage under screwcap. The result is not only that critics such as myself already see it as a better wine, but that it has the potential to continue in that direction, due to their scientific research over the past 20 years. As Gibson says, the 2018 Homage is sealed under screwcap because it’s a better wine for it, both now and in the future.