Anyone who listens to the show knows that I'm a big fan of the screwcap.  Not that I mind corks, but I get to my wine faster when I don't have to fiddle with an opener and then I can bring my bottle home from the radio taping and not abandon it.  Available from New Zealand and Australia for a long time, it seems that France is now coming on board.  Here are excerpts from an article in The Telegraph (link to the full story is at the end of this posting):

While New World wines have adopted the screw top for years - with up to 90 per cent of New Zealand wines and 60 per cent of Australian bottles using them – giving up the time-honoured cork has met with much stiffer resistance in France beyond the cheaper end of the market.

But according to one wine expert, two of the world's top names - Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in Burgundy, whose bottles can sell for tens of thousands of pounds, and Bordeaux's legendary Chateau Margaux – are now looking into screw tops.

...one of Burgundy's best-known producers, Jean-Claude Boisset, has already started them on top wines, including a Chambertin grand cru 2005, which sells for almost £100 a bottle. This year, a third of the producer's 200,000 bottles will use screw tops.

"We started at the high end, because we are convinced that screw tops are perfect for fine wines that need to age, as they protect them better than cork from oxidation," said Gregory Patriat, in charge of bottling at Boisset. "We're not staying that corks are bad, it's just that screw tops are better," he said.

 ...According to recent figures, of the seven billion wines bottles sealed each year, the number using screw tops has shot up from 300 million in 2003 to 2.5 billion this year. According to the world's best-known wine critic, Robert Parker, wines bottled with corks will be in the minority by 2015.

"The cork industry has not invested in techniques that will prevent 'corked' wines afflicted with the musty, moldy, wet-basement smell that ruins up to 15 percent of all wine bottles," he wrote recently wrote. The one exception, he said, would be "great wines meant to age for 20 to 30 years that will still be primarily cork finished".

I found it fascinating that they would start with the good stuff - and let the French traditionalists exhale a little to know that their wine will still cost too much even without the cork.

To read the full story, click here.