Screwy solutions to corks

Debate has raged over what is best for wine - cork, plastic or screw top.

Now a leading expert has come out firmly in favour of the metal twist cap, which is usually dismissed as cheap and unfashionable.

Hugh Johnson, author of the bestselling Pocket Wine Book, says they should no longer be considered downmarket.

'If our ancestors had screw tops for their bottles, they would have used them and so should we,' he writes in the latest edition of his book. 'Buy wines from suppliers with the courage to use modern stoppers.'

Corks are blamed for ruining up to one in ten bottles because they carry a fungus which leaves the contents damaged and smelling of wet socks.

Screw tops remove the infection risk but have gained a reputation for being unfashionable since they were introduced by the makers of cheap German wine in the 1970s.

Since then, leading vineyards in Australia and New Zealand have started using them and British supermarket chains have followed suit. Some screw-top wines now cost more than £150 a bottle.

Tom Forrest, of the Vinopolis wine tasting centre in London, blamed over-production for the poor quality of cork sometimes used. But he believed they would not be replaced in a hurry, saying: 'The romance of uncorking a bottle of a wine at a candle-lit dinner is not the same if you have to unscrew the top.'