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56 W i n e s & V i n e s D e C e M B e R 2 0 1 4 O f all beverages, wine is the most varied. While one can classify beers into a handful of types, and spirits into 10 basic bar pours and a hundred cor- dials, wines cannot be lumped into any less than 1,000 significant vari- etal types and European appellations, plus any number of proprietary blends. There are more than 250,000 wine brands for sale in the U.S. market alone, and easily 1 million for sale somewhere in Europe. Yet within this variation lies one prime directive: that a given specific label shall be consistent within itself. Wines do not exist to slack thirst, but to spark the intellect. Specific wines of any stripe are presup- posed to be as consistent as movies, with every copy identical. Without this cardinal rule, the entire edifice of wine sales—Wine Spectator scores, Parker reviews, tech sheets, gold medals, flash sales, blogs, point-of-sale advertisements—collapses. Sophisticated collectors have come to expect and tolerate the bottle-to-bottle variation that accompanies decades of aging, but the workaday wine world is founded on the assumption of product con- sistency. Like the public faith that sustains the dollar, the economy that pays your sal- ary is firmly rooted in the unshakable belief that for any wine we choose to eval- uate, its replicate bottles will behave likewise. There is just one prob- lem. It isn't true. I am not talking about cork taint. That unhappy phenomenon, which first bloomed in the public con- sciousness in the late 1980s, is easily identified by an expert and exists in no more than one bottle per case under cork. Winer- ies took action, and this incidence has been further reduced by the growing prevalence of alternative closures. The media, for once, has embraced these new technologies and coop- erated in educating con- sumers. This threat to the industry has been, in my estimation, artfully avoided. That moldy compound TCA is no longer Public Enemy No. 1. A five-year average of the incidence of technical flaws leading to rejection at the London International Wine Challenge reveals that cork taints were found in 1.8% of wines submitted, com- prising 27% of expulsions, with oxidation (27%) and reduction (26%) together com- prising more than half of flawed wines, dual artifacts of winemakers' inability to manage oxygen. As we peel the quality onion, total package oxygen (TPO) man- agement is now in the spotlight. A new tool Though it has grown into the second larg- est supplier of wine closures behind Por- tuguese natural cork firm Amorim, when Nomacorc appeared on the scene in 1999, its stated objective was to eliminate bottle variation. It turns out to be utterly impractical to attempt this through the simple expedient of a reliable co-extruded cork alternative. Without a consistent clo- sure, to be sure, even the most consistent bottling will turn out inconsistent wines. But growing evidence suggests that no matter how good the closure, bottling equipment and procedures have turned out highly inconsistent TPO levels. Wines in the same shipping case, particularly fragile white wines, were exhibiting sub- stantial sensory quality variation. Nomacorc's response to this challenge was to develop an optical sensor system capable of reading oxygen concentration through glass. Christened NomaSense, this system allowed winemakers for the first time to study oxygen pickup inside fully sealed tanks, hoses, pumps and bottles. Much of the new instrumentation's rea- son for being involved bottling line audit- ing procedures that were simple, non-destructive and non-invasive, enabling differentiation on a scale never before contemplated, such as assessment of individual filler valves. Measurement The Birth of Precision Bottling Audit of bottle oxygen variation in winery trials shows size of the challenge By Clark Smith Highlights • A survey of variation in total package oxygen (TPO) among 17 wineries re- veals startling challenges for wineries large and small. • Wineries commonly exhibit a U-shaped curve, with high dissolved oxygen at the beginning and end of the run, which is not alleviated by standard inerting practices. • The highest contributor to TPO is the headspace oxygen on screwcap lines. Winemakers use NomaSense technology to measure oxygen pickup inside tanks, hoses, pumps and bottles (above). G R A P E G R O W I N G W I N E M A K I N G