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Which wines do you close with plastic stoppers?
How a wine bottle is sealed influences the maturation and shelf life of the wine after bottling. The decisive factor is how much air (and thus oxygen, which reacts with the sensitive aromatic substances in the wine) can penetrate the bottle through the closure. The more the wine is exposed to oxygen, the faster it matures - or in the negative case, degenerates.
The plastic stopper creates the "popping" experience of a traditional cork, but avoids its danger of cork taint. It is made of a special rubber or Teflon compound and is more or less elastic depending on the manufacturing process (injection moulding, extrusion, co-extrusion). It closes the bottle more tightly than a conventional cork, whereby certain makes allow a precisely defined, minimal air supply (keyword: oxygen management); the leading company here is Nomacorc.
Plastic stoppers are mostly used for wines that are to be drunk relatively quickly (within one to two years after bottling) - a requirement that, incidentally, applies to about 80 per cent of all wines worldwide. Long-term studies on the sealing behaviour of plastic stoppers do not yet exist, and the interactions between ingredients of the closure material and the wine have also not yet been fully clarified. Experiments have shown that wines with plastic closures degraded sulphur at an above-average rate, which reduced their shelf life.
Plastic stoppers are widespread above all in the New World, but also in some southern European countries.