Natural Cork Seminar

There was a promotional seminar about natural cork.

When there is something wrong with a bottle of wine, cork is usually the one to be blamed, but many of the fault are actually not caused by cork.
Besides, the quality of cork is much improved and there are lesser and lesser cases of TCA contamination on cork.

Nowadays, you can find a lot of alternative to cork such as synthetic closures, screw caps or even crown cap.
These have advantages such as lower cost, easy opening or durability.
But when it comes to consumers perception, none of them can match natural cork (at least, not yet). The recent research shows that people accept alternative closures for affordable range white wines, but for premium white and red wine, natural cork is the choice of consumers. Moreover, it's 100% natural and recyclable!
It happens to be that consumers are not the only people who prefer natural cork. After the brief seminar, there was tasting of wines with wine makers, who choose natural cork as the best closure for their wines.

Jordan Winery from Sonoma
Chardonnay 2015 Fresh green apple, pear and hazelnut.
Chardonnay 2011 was a challenging vintage. Spring rain destroy 40% of crops and summer was cool. However, wine turned out to be nice with dried, white flower bruised apple, nuts and grapefruit.

Shafer Vineyards from Napa
Cabernet Sauvignon 2015 Floral, cherry, bell pepper and milk chocolate.
Cabernet Sauvignon 2009 This wine with smooth texture was aged in low-toasted barrel. The notes of coffee come from bottle age.

Dry Creek Vineyard from Sonoma
Zinfandel 2015 Strawberry, black pepper, strong tannin.
Zinfandel 1993 Aromas are more decent than opulent: strawberry jam like Russian tea, red flower and mint. Beautiful wine with fine tannin.

They firmly believe that if the bottles were sealed with other closure beside natural cork, wine wouldn't have the same quality.

By the way, the conception that wine with natural cork breathes is not exactly right. Wine does breathe, but oxygen comes from cork itself, not through the cork. Oxygen contained inside cork is released into wine little by little. This process lasts about 3 years then bouquet would develop in the bottle in the reductive environment.
This I learned at natural cork seminar and was quite shocking revelation to me...