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George M. Taber
Biography

George M. Taber, the author of Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the 1976 Paris Tasting that Revolutionized Wine (Scribner, September 2005), has interviewed presidents, dictators, corporate tycoons and even the Beatles in a journalism career that lasted more than 40 years. But the most important event he ever covered was a wine tasting in Paris in 1976. Nine eminent French wine experts, in a blind tasting, selected in both the red wine and the white wine competition unknown California wines as better than the best French wines. It turned out to be the turning point in the history of California wine and launched the globalization of wine that we know today. Food critic Anthony Dias Blue called the event "the most talked about wine tasting of the [20th] century." At the time Taber was a Paris correspondent for Time magazine, and he was the only journalist at the event, which was staged by an Englishman who owned a wine store and school in Paris. It was Taber's story in Time that broke the news to the world and caused oenophiles around the world to take their first serious look at California wines. Taber spent 21 years at Time as a reporter, writer and editor. He had assignments for Time in New York, Bonn, Paris, Houston and Washington, D.C. before being named a senior editor at the magazine. For six years he was Time's business editor and was later editor of the World section. In 1988, Taber left Time to start njbiz, a weekly newspaper that covers New Jersey business. He sold the paper in 2005. A Californian by birth, which gave him his first interest in wine, Taber graduated from Georgetown University and got a masters degree from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. He now lives on Block Island, Rhode Island with his wife Jean.

AN INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE M.TABER
AUTHOR OF TO CORK OR NOT TO CORK

Q. Why did you write an entire book on the subject of cork?
A. During my travels to wine areas around the world to research my last book, Judgment of Paris, and in later talks with wine professionals, I noticed that the biggest topic of conversation was how to close a wine bottle. Not only was it topic numero uno, people were passionate about it. As Australian winemaker Brian Croser told me, it is like the wars of religion. People hate corks or they hate screwcaps. Few experts are neutral.

Q. Where does cork come from?
A. Cork is made with from the bark of a type of oak tree that grows mainly around the western part of the Mediterranean basin roughly from Sicily to Tunisia. The two biggest producing countries are Spain and Portugal, which together account for approximately three-quarters of all cork closure production.

Q. How long has cork been used?
A. Cork was used to help seal wine jugs for about 1,000 years from roughly 500 BC to 500 AD. Then it wasn't used for 1,000 years until the 1600s, when it was rediscovered simultaneously with the invention of inexpensive glass bottles in England that became known as the English bottle. Only when there were inexpensive bottles, corks, and corkscrews did the world first enjoy the pleasures of aged wines.

Q. How did they seal wine containers in the thousand years when cork wasn't used?
A. Wine was usually kept in kegs that were often sealed with wooden pegs soaked in olive oil. However, people drank wine quickly, for the most part, before it was exposed to air and turned to vinegar. In those days, old wine was considered bad wine, and the price of the previous year's wine fell as soon as the new vintage was made.

Q. If cork has been used for so long, why change?
A. There are two driving factors. One is cost. Since cork had a monopoly on wine-bottle closures, there was no competition. With the worldwide boom in quality wine in the last four decades, the price of cork went up sharply. The second factor is damage done to wines through a process known as "corking" or "cork taint" (the terms are interchangeable). When that happens, even the most expensive wine in the world can smell like wet newspapers and have an off taste.

Q. How widespread is cork taint?
A. Statistics are all over the place. Some experts say that it's less than one bottle in a hundred; others say that it's one bottle in a case of twelve. Cork taint can be very subtle. Some experts recognize minute amounts of it, while others only notice it at very high levels. It takes just a little to ruin a bottle-two or three parts per trillion-and one part per trillion is the equivalent in time of one second in 320 centuries.

Q. So what's the alternative?
A. Starting in a serious way in the 1970s, wineries began looking for alternatives. The first real breakthrough was the plastic cork in the early 1990s. Then, in around 2000, the screwcap, whose lineage goes back to the mid-19th century and the Mason jar, really took off in Australia and New Zealand. Those countries were not as steeped in tradition as Europe and the U.S., and they also seemed to have a higher incidence of cork taint. Screwcaps are now making major inroads in Europe and California. But neither plastic corks nor screwcaps are perfect. Like cork, they also have their problems. Plastic corks are hard to get out of bottles and sometimes impossible to get back in. Many experts maintain that screwcaps create their own taste problems, just different ones from corks.

Q. Are there any other closures?
A. Companies large and small are trying to come up with other alternatives. Alcoa, the giant aluminum company, is selling a glass stopper, which has been popular with top German wineries. Others are trying to take the tainting material out of raw cork. There's even the condom solution of putting a thin membrane over the end of the cork to stop taint from leaching into the wine. There's no shortage of new ideas.

Q. Is cork doing anything to fight back?
A. Cork companies are naturally terrified of losing their market. Until very recently, the cork companies sat on their monopoly position and blamed everyone else for their problem. The major cork companies in the last five years or so have been spending huge amounts of money on research. Some, but not all, of them have improved their quality control. They are having some success, but they haven't totally solved the problem and may never be able to totally solve it.

Q. What's the current market share for various closures?
A. This is an annual $4 billion business worldwide. Some 20-billion wine-bottle closures are used each year. Despite the major inroads alternatives have made in the past few years in some important markets, about 16 billion of those closures are still natural cork products. So 80% of the closure market is still in the hands of cork. That's down from a virtual monopoly two decades ago, but the cork industry retains a commanding position. Plastic corks total some 2.5 billion. Screwcaps, despite all the hoopla and recent success, are still only about 1.5 billion. The use of cork and other closures also varies greatly by country. In New Zealand some 95% of closures are screwcaps. In France only about 5% of bottles have screwcaps.

Q. After all your research, what closure do you prefer?
A. There is no perfect solution. For a wine that's made to be drunk young, like a Sauvignon Blanc, a screwcap is fine and convenient. For other wines, such as a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Shiraz, which get better by aging in the bottle, a cork helps the wine age gracefully. We have entered the age of multiple wine closures, and that will be good for both wine consumers and wine makers.

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