The taming of the screw-cap

I love the smell of cork in the evening. When work's done, when darkness has fallen, when the glasses are on the table and the phone can look after itself, there's nothing better than easing a long, fat, moist one out of a wellaged bottle and sniffing its enticing mixture of wine, truffley darkness and waxy sweetness.

Cork, after all, is oak wood - and wine loves oak. The flavour a wine exchanges with a clean, topquality cork as it ages are as precious as those it acquires from an oak barrel.

Which is why Bob Campbell thinks I'm mad. "Sounds dodgy to me," he says, when I explained the theory above. "I don't like the smell of cork. I regard it as a contaminant." Bob Campbell is a Master of Wine from New Zealand; he knows what he's talking about.

Indeed, he was even giving up his spare time free of charge to come to Britain and spread the anti-cork message. The anti-cork campaigners are up on their chargers, and their spurs are digging into horseflesh. If they have their way, it's curtains for cork.

They have, as people on chargers often do, a point. A minority of corks ( somewhere between two and 12 per cent) are spoiled, and this spoilage makes wine smell and taste like mouldy cardboard. This is what wine folk mean when they say a wine is "corked". It can happen with £2.99 bottles and it can happen with £100 bottles, but it's equally unwelcome in either case. The cork producers are desperate to find a solution. They have been too complacent for too long, though, and the alternatives are making rapid inroads into their market. Plastic cork is one; the other - and it was this which brought Bob Campbell to Britain - is the screwcap.

I can't find anyone (other than the manufacturers) who actually likes plastic corks. They look horrible. They feel clammy. They can be difficult to get out of bottles, and are almost impossible to put back in. You exchange the possibility of cork taint for the possibility of plastic taint.

Another problem which gets the anti-cork brigade foaming at the mouth is oxidation, and the evidence suggests that plastic corks allow as much air in as ordinary corks do.

Screwcaps, by contrast, keep air out efficiently and appear to leave no taint of their own. So convinced are a group of New Zealand wine producers by the virtues of screwcap that they have decided to band together to form a common front in order to get the market to accept screwcaps. Among them are some of the country's top producers like Kumeu River, Jackson Estate and Wither Hills.

The first of these wines has now arrived in Britain: it's the razor-edged, lime-pungent 2001 Jackson Estate Sauvignon Blanc. The producers have sent me three bottles with screwcap and three bottles with cork to compare. I have opened one of each and found the screwcap one fruitier and brighter, while the cork one was a little softer, waxier and more complex. If you want to try the same comparison, the screwcap version is in Oddbins and larger Tesco stores, while Waitrose stocks the cork version (all £8.99). I intend to keep the other two pairs for a decade or more before retesting.

That, after all, is the trial period we need. Cork has more or less lost the argument (environmental considerations aside) for wines intended to dance swiftly towards the dinner table. The risk of a corked bottle simply isn't worth running.