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Slideshow
Close range: the latest trends in stoppers
The closures industry is a fast-moving one, with manufacturers continually investing in improving their products. Sally Easton MW looks at the current market, and highlights new ideas, such as plant-based stoppers and anti-counterfeiting measures.
There has been a huge amount of research and development in the closures industry in the two decades since TCA toppled the de facto cork monopoly. Investment, innovation and strides towards greater sustainability in this sector show no sign of abating, even as that touchstone technical taint edges its way closer towards defeat.
Recent innovation for screwcaps has been about finessing liners of different oxygen transmission rates (OTR). “There is interest in the market for liners giving a more subtle control over the maturation or oxygenation of wine,” says Davide Strocco, managing director of screwcap manufacturer Astro Group.
“However, the ‘standard’ Saranex liner will remain widely prevalent because it offers by far the best value-for-money ratio; it works very well on most wines and gives a stable, predictable result. It has more than 20 years’ proven track record. Alternative liners are certainly of interest, but mainly for the very high-end market.”
Removing polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC), which can release dioxins on incineration, from the liner improves sustainability values.
Elena Zaharieva, director of investor relations at Bulgarian company Herti, says: “Liners play an important role for the quality of the wine… we offer liners suitable for pasteurisation and controlling the sulphites in the wine. Our research led to creating the Vinstar Smart wine closure with a PVDC-free compound liner.” Amcor Capsules, which makes Stelvin, has offered its own range of PVDC-free, OTR-specific liners since 2014. Trade and communication manager Lucie Neubauerova says the company is “working on a liner that is able to withhold even more pressure, including pasteurisation”.
Not the holy grail
But it turns out that OTR may not be the Holy Grail after all. Neubauerova says winemakers have various views on the subject: “Every winemaker has their own winemaking methods and may work differently with oxygen management. They are the experts; we give them the choice of a consistent and measurable OTR level.”
Strocco is also more prosaic than many about OTR, saying: “OTR is perceived as important. However, there is not a common consensus on what should be the best rate, because wines are different and winemakers are different.”
A key risk area for oxygen uptake remains bottling itself. This is true for both within-neck stoppering, and screwcap application. Strocco says: “There is a lot of talk about special liners and OTR, but definitely not enough knowledge about application methods. As unpoetic as it may sound, applying the screwcap properly is far more fundamental than choosing the liner that will best enhance the evolution of the wine you produce.” He emphasises the importance of his company’s investment in customer training in capping protocols.
Guala Closures Group also has different liners, but Frédéric de Vanssay, group marketing director, is keen to discuss
‘e-wak’ (wak is the company’s brand of screwcap). “We’re going to launch the first smart closure for aluminium in the wine industry,” he says. “It has a near-field communication (NFC) chip in the closure. You tap your phone on the closure and you have information on the screen.” Producers can get their information directly to consumers,
de Vanssay explains. He also stresses: “We’re fighting against counterfeiting – it’s an authenticity certificate for the product. The landing page tells you the bottle has not been opened before. And you can track and trace the bottle”, giving the producer or brand owner full traceability, as well as direct consumer engagement. “Because the NFC chip is inside the cap, the chip is protected.”
When it comes to developments in cork, Peter Gago, chief winemaker at Penfolds Wines, says: “Anecdotally, cork quality assurance continues to improve across the industry. At the top end there are great developments in testing methods to analyse individual corks and root out those with TCA. Optical sorting technologies are also assisting to remove bark defects and improve OTR consistency. These developments provide winemakers with robust closure options to suit wine style.
“Now the industry has cork that performs more consistently, and screwcap.” Coming from someone at the top of the wine industry, that is no faint praise.
According to Monika Michalski, marketing manager for Cork Supply: “The trend is shifting to individually guaranteed corks, whether natural or technical. Generally, there’s been an increase in demand for natural corks for high-quality and premium wines, and in particular, for natural corks with individual TCA guarantees.”
Individually guaranteed TCA taint-free (<0.5 nanograms per litre) micro-agglomerate technical cork stopper Diam was for many years the only one on the market, having been introduced in 2004. The more recent VINC, from Cork Supply, is individually guaranteed to be TCA taint-free, with variants for three and five-year shelf lives. Michalski says: “Now that we produce technical corks we can use everything we purchase. The cork planks have been bought for natural [single piece] cork, so the raw material for the granules is very high quality.”
And Portuguese company Amorim offers individual guarantees at the <1ng/l mark on its Twintop Evo and Neutrocork premium.
Individual guarantees for single-piece natural cork has been the revolution of the past couple of years, with various proprietary techniques to guarantee individual TCA taint-free corks. There are four versions on the market.
Miguel Cardozo of MA Silva says: “Since it was launched in January 2016 we have invested €4.5 million (£3.97m),” tripling capacity of the OnebyOne
brand. Cork Supply is doubling production capacity for its DS100 (individual TCA detection by human nose) and DS100+ (automated TCA detection). Amorim’s communications director, Carlos de Jesus, says: “NDTech is the only system offering an individual guarantee for single-piece natural cork stoppers that has twice been scientifically independently validated, by the AWRI and Geisenheim.”
He adds that the company expects to double sales again of NDTech in 2018. Vinventions’ Selektion is also
individually guaranteed by a human nose. All these have tiny production runs. De Jesus continues: “We want to extend guarantees to all single-piece natural cork stoppers by 2020.” That would be some serious upscaling.
Sticking point
The colloquially named ‘glue’, or, more technically described, ‘food-grade binders’ that stick cork granules together into a stopper shape, is typically a type of plastic, accompanied by the requisite food-safety certificates. It can comprise around 25% of the stopper. Diam is ahead of the game in finding a more sustainable solution. Dominique Tourneix, director general of Diam Bouchage, explains: “With Origine by Diam, we have replaced 100% of the polyols in the polyurethane binder with castor oil, and the microspheres with an emulsion of beeswax, to offer a secure and consistent closure – there is no taint, and mastered OTR.” So far, Origine is available on Diam 10 and Diam 30, but the plan is to extend Origine throughout the whole of the company’s range.
Vinventions has also removed plastic (the glue binder) from one of its products – SUBR – a technical cork with a TCA-taint-free guarantee. Heino Freudenberg, president and CEO of Vinventions, says: “We worked hard to find a binder based on re-growing materials, and found it in corn sugar.” This glue-free generation SUBR will be introduced to the market later in 2018.
These innovations certainly add pressure to eliminate plastic-based glues from technical stoppers.
Elsewhere, other research by Diam, in conjunction with the IFV (Institut Français de la Vigne) in Burgundy showed that “on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, Diam, with a very low permeability [OTR] level, allows the reduction of the sulphur dioxide level by 10 mg/l to 15 mg/l without damaging the wine evolution compared with a traditional cork closure,” says Tourneix. “Mastering OTR by combining different raw materials and achieving a consistent structure are the key factors to achieve low-added-sulphur bottled wines.”
Consistency
One parameter where technical corks score better than single-piece natural corks is that of consistency (whatever the quality of consistency) because they’re made to a recipe, and are therefore all the same. Single-piece cork is punched from bark. Then quality is graded, or sorted, typically by eye, on external assessment. Thus batch consistency is arguably one of the key areas of vulnerability of single-piece natural cork.
For the past couple of years, Amorim has made strides in this area, with de Jesus saying: “We have technology that allows us to measure the inside of natural cork stoppers. We can do the inside and the outside of the cork. We have machines that measure the flow of a gas going through a natural whole-cork stopper.
“An algorithm interprets what’s on the inside of the cork and will remove the cork if it is outside the cut-off point.” He further explains the external “sorting of natural whole-cork stoppers is now done by machines that run on very powerful algorithms, on laser-based technology.” This technology has tightened the tolerances on each of the quality grades of the company’s single-piece stoppers, improving their consistency.
Sectioning share
The total size of the global closures market is estimated to be around 19 billion, with splits varying according to the closure-manufacturer-origin of the estimate. Both screwcap and cork sources cite share growth in absolute terms. Amcor’s Neubauerova says: “According to Euromonitor International data from 2012-17, the use of aluminium closures has been growing at a rate of 5% per year. Screwcap is taking share from cork and other type of stoppers.”
Cardozo of MA Silva adds: “We have been witnessing corks gaining share in markets that in the past had switched to alternative closures. Clients think about which closure adds more value to their wine. Recent market analysis shows that cork adds value to their wines, increasing the price point of a bottle.” Michalski of Cork Supply agrees, saying: “We see more high-end premium wine maintaining or starting to use natural cork. When consumers think of premium wine they think of natural cork.”
This trend for premiumisation of closures has been picked up elsewhere. Katerina Slezáková, marketing manager for Preciosa, which makes Vinolok, says: “We have launched a new collection, Vinolok Premium, which is customised for the premium segment.“ It features various size and shape options for the glass portion above the sealing section.
On the synthetics front, Vinventions has fascinating news. At the start of 2015, Nomacorc, the hugely dominant synthetic stopper manufacturer, was bought by Vinventions, which is effectively a one-stop-shop for closures, its USP being that it manufactures, rather than solely distributes, most of the stoppers it offers.
Nomacorc is in the process of changing the entire Nomacorc range to Plantcorc, meaning that every Nomacorc closure will be 100% plant-based, although some Nomacorc co-extruded technology is being used in Vinventions’ low-cost Syntek synthetic stoppers.
Fossil fuels
Second, and this is where it gets tricky, Plantcorc comprises four models: Reserva, Select, Classic and Smart. Heino Freudenberg says: “Reserva and Select use 100% plant-based raw materials,”, while Classic and Smart comprise a different mix of plant-based and fossil-fuel origin.
If Reserva and Select solely use plant-based raw materials, they are no longer part of the synthetics (plastic stoppers) category. There’s a new – “renewable-alternatives” – category of closures. Vinventions does not separate out its ‘renewable alternatives’ from its ‘part-fossil-fuel alternatives’, so it is impossible to get a feel for how big such a new category might be, but Reserva and Select are the top-of-the-range stoppers, so are likely to be the smallest fraction numerically.
Nonetheless, the “mid-term” vision, says Freudenberg, is for “Classic and Smart to use 100% plant-based raw materials”, so the aspiration for increasing sustainability is there along with and an eventual move out of fossil fuels for Plantcorc.
Sustainability is only one element, though. While Reserva and Select are cited as having ‘negative carbon footprints’, Freudenberg emphasises
“the science behind the sugar cane material is a long and expensive process. It uses another foaming agent and different equipment, meaning wine-preservation performance has moved up to reach 15 years for Select and 25 years for Reserva.”
Sustainability
Sustainability remains a key driver of the product (PVDC, glue, sugar-cane) and process. Diam, for example, re-calculates its carbon footprint every two years. Tourneix says: “Since Diam has been marketed, the value has progressively decreased, owing to the technical and process optimisation.” Energy now represents around 30% of the company’s greenhouse gas emissions, compared with 40% in 2006.
A life-cycle assessment (LCA) is typically wider-reaching than a carbon footprint, including such things as land and water use, acidification and eutrophication, as well as greenhouse gas emissions. It’s been 10 years since Amorim presented its first LCA comparing closure types. Asked if the company would repeat the study, de Jesus replies “We’re going to be looking at carbon emissions of technical stoppers because it’s important to have credible information and raise the issue of cutting down pristine ecosystems to plant monocultures to create wine stoppers that are themselves alternatives to the alternatives.”
There is clearly still a wealth of innovation and research being undertaking across the closures industries. But are we witnessing the early throes of plastic stoppers’ demise?
• This article first appeared in the February issue of the drinks business
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