Winemakers, take note: It’s not just your choice of closure that contributes to a wine’s development. If your bottling isn’t up to scratch, your wines will develop faster.
Researchers at Geisenheim Research Centre in Germany found that if bottling processes are not managed properly, it causes irreversible damage to a wine and its post-bottling development.
Dr. Stéphane Vidal, global director of enology for Nomacorc, which took part in the study, said: “Ultimately, we found that if bottling conditions are well-managed, then oxygen transfer rates (OTRs) through the closure influences wine evolution in a more pronounced mannerâ€.
Geisenheim research also showed the headspace also represents a significant amount of oxygen that contributes to wine evolution.
“Our results show that headspace oxygen, which has largely been ignored by the industry, is a very critical factor impacting wine development and more specifically, a wine’s oxidation resistance influencing shelf-life performance,†said Dr. Rainer Jung at Geisenheim.
