Wineries put years of work into their products and spend millions of dollars marketing them - and meanwhile, we're raping the cork forests of Portugal. The long-term effects on aging are still being tested, though, so we won't know that for 10 or 20 or 50 years. Such respected, well-known Barossa wineries as Jacob's Creek now seal all their wines with plastic closures. If you're looking for an excellent seal, plastic has all kinds of advantages. You can store your wines upright because you don't have to keep the cork wet, and removal is always consistent.
Conventional corks tend to break in half or crumble.
Fontane says most of the feedback about plastic stoppers has been positive. We weren't going to win those people over, even though sniffing a cork doesn't give you an accurate impression of a wine's bouquet at all. Synthetic stoppers are now widely used in Europe, US, South America, South Africa almost everywhere, it seems, except Australia. Longing for your hunk of bark is just as backward as people in Dom Perignon's time longing for their oily rags. Some Community members blame a convoluted distribution system that boosts prices.