Theatrical Screwtops for Wine

I am shocked that there is no "Food: Drink: Wine" category. So much so that I am having an extra glass of wine to get over it.

Screw-tops for wine are one the greatest contributions to human progress since wine. A lot of people used to get (and still do get) all snooty about them, either because the first wines to be given screw- tops were pretty cheap and nasty, or because the people in question do not actually know much about wine.

With very few exceptions, a bottle of wine is not a religious artefact - it's a drink that can be bad, indifferent or good. Screwtops eliminate the risk of a bottle being corked, and have the advantages of not requiring special hardware and of being easily re- closeable in the unlikely event that you are left with an unfinished bottle at the end of breakfast. Only a subset of mostly expensive wines benefit from storage under a cork if kept for years or decades.

Howevertheless, it can't be denied that screw-tops lack theatre. There is no elaborate foil-cutting and cork-screwing, no moment of suspense as the sommelier buries your bottle between his thighs and tugs. No squeak of cork easing out of glass. No cheerful "pop". Instead, there's just a little snapping sound - rather like that of a small mammal having its neck broken - as the screw-top breaks away from the metal collar. It's all a little bit sad.

Proposed, therefore, is an altogether more engaging screw- top. To begin with, it should have the same lead-foil condom over it that is found on cork bottles, with a little tab that can be peeled to remove the foil. Next, the thread of the screw-top (or at least the bottom-most part of it) should have a layer of gutta-percha bonded to it - this will squeak appealingly as the cap is twisted. Finally, the tiny bits of metal that connect the cap to the metal collar should be a little wider than they currently are, and should be designed in varying thicknesses so that they snap - audibly - in succession rather than all at once. Potentially, the metalwork could be engineered to produce pings rather than snaps, perhaps in ascending pitch. The last bit of metal should be particularly strong, such that significant effort is needed to finally free the cap from the collar, and a significant sound is produced.

Having thus broken the bonds between the cap and the collar, we now need to think about the sound of the actual unscrewing process. At present, it's just a sort of scritty-scratty sound of thin metal sliding over glass. Instead, the glass thread of the bottleneck should be embossed with transverse grooves which engage with one or more little metal nubbins in the cap, to produce something more sonorous.

Finally, with the bottle opened, there is one last step in the ritual to be addressed. With a cork bottle, it's customary to hand the cork to a designated cork-sniffer amongst the party, to verify that all is well and the bottle isn't corked. Failing this, a small amount of wine can be poured for tasting, for the same reason. Neither of these can (or should) be done with a screw-top bottle: there is no point in sniffing the cap itself, and equally there is little point in tasting the wine since it can't possibly be corked. It is, in fact, bad form to taste a screw-top wine in this way, unless you suspect that the wine has been tampered with (for instance, refilled with a cheaper wine and re-capped), which is unlikely in the extreme.

So, what to do in lieu of cork-sniffing or tasting? Well, perhaps the simplest option is to have a little dot inside the cap that responds to temperature by changing colour. When the screw-cap is presented to you, simply peer into it knowingly - perhaps hold it up to the light - and see if it indicates a suitable temperature for the wine in question. If all is well (or even if it's not - most people bluff), you can then give the sommelier that special nod that says "I, an authority on wines, recognise that you, the sommelier, have correctly opened the right bottle of wine, and that it is fit to be distributed amongst the others at the table".

Cheers.