KEY POINTS:
New Zealand has dramatically changed the way it packages its wine, shifting 90 per cent of all bottled wines to screwcaps in the past five years. Winemakers claim that they have done so to improve the quality of their wine, but in Asia they may have hurt their chances of success in the premium end of the wine market.
Asian consumers are notoriously sensitive to perceived status and, while they are not yet sophisticated wine consumers, they are prepared to spend extravagantly on wine that looks top class. Unfortunately for New Zealand's winemakers, prestige international wines do not have screwcaps.
"If consumers want quality, they will see the closures as an indicator of what to buy. Corks mean quality," says Singapore-based wine consultant and wine writer Malcolm Tham.
Tham was one of the organisers of a seminar on wine closures at last weekend's Wine for Asia 2007 exhibition held in Singapore and he sees New Zealand as being identified as a champion of screwcaps. So when Tham set about organising the closure seminar he asked New Zealand Winegrowers to nominate a speaker supportive of screwcaps.
Does this amount to an official endorsement of screwcaps by NZ Winegrowers?
Not according to NZ Winegrowers' chief executive, Philip Gregan.
"We don't have a position on screwcaps, corks, plastic, glass, anything at all. We responded to a request for a speaker by nominating somebody who uses screwcaps who was going to be there. Nothing more than that," he told the Herald.
However, NZ Winegrowers is particularly sensitive about the screwcap issue and, following a recent story identifying known carcinogens in screwcap seals, it adopted the role as the screwcap industry representative here.
And as Tham confirms, we are considered to be active supporters of screwcaps throughout the wine world, with screwcap closures being promoted on New Zealand stands at wine trade fairs.
The closure debate is the hot wine topic internationally and, as the Singapore event was under way, there was also a seminar at Copia, California's leading food and wine institution, where a group of high-powered wine-closure specialists from Europe and North America delivered papers on the state of the debate.
At Copia, the commercial and marketing director for screwcap producer Stelvin Corp, Bruno de Saizieu, identified New Zealand as the leading example of screwcap adoption worldwide, even as he admitted that screwcaps still have a problem with their cheap wine image.
De Saizieu characterised the advantages of screwcaps as: "Regularity, convenience and simplicity." All are distinct advantages in the supermarket trade but are not necessarily selling points for high-quality wine, a factor identified by author George M. Faber in his newly published To Cork or Not to Cork as the "hard-to-describe but impossible-to-deny factor that can only be described as the romance of the cork".
Exactly how much this is a factor in a high-quality, cork-closed French burgundy claiming $1500 on the international fine wine market and a screwcapped New Zealand pinot noir commanding less than $100 will continue to challenge marketing academics for some time. But according to Tham, it is a factor in Asia.
"There is no point pushing the ideas of wine quality associated with screwcaps and corks because Asians are not in a position to decide.
"We don't know and, mostly, we don't care. It is an issue with producers, not consumers," he says, adding "corks mean quality".
Te Mata Estate's Nicolas Buck does not think the situation is that simple.
"There are many Asias," he says. "And different Asian markets respond differently to different closures."
Te Mata Estate is New Zealand's largest fine wine producer and as such has a vested interest in the technical and marketing rationale behind the different closures. As a result, the company uses cork and screwcaps.
"We have elected to go with what we believe is the best closure for the quality and character of each of our wines. Marketing has been a secondary consideration," Buck says.
"We use screwcaps for wines that are going to be drunk early in their lives but, for wines like Coleraine that can age in bottle for 20 years, we believe that cork is the best closure."
With exports to more than 20 international markets, Buck has good intelligence on the response of each to the different closures his company uses.
"In Australia and New Zealand, you could sell everything in screwcaps but, in conservative markets in North America, Europe and northern Asia, they remain resistant to screwcaps. Cork is still king."
He also says that in spite of the recent flurry of activity around the closure debate, it is less heated than it was a year ago.
He finds trade attitudes in most countries are now ambivalent towards closures and can cope with anything winemakers provide or that their consumers want.
As for New Zealand's image being tarnished by its extensive use of screwcaps, he has no evidence.
"I think it is becoming too sophisticated for that sort of thing," he says.
"New Zealand may sell a lot of sauvignon blanc but we are gaining respect for other wines now, so we are not a simple wine producer any more. Perhaps it would have been a problem five years ago, but not now and I suspect even less so in the future.
"There are other issues with closures that are becoming more important than image, such as environmental issues.
"The romance of cork is being replaced by the reality of global climate change. That is something we must recognise to survive."
* Keith Stewart is a freelance writer with 38 years' experience of the local wine industry.
