Writing About Barefoot Wines for Nomacorc

Here's my latest piece for the Nomacorc, a short piece on Barefoot Wines and the need for a better appreciation of everyday table wines in the United States. Check it out! The piece also features the freelance work debut of Bella, current dog intern here at Benito Wine Reviews.

I realize the blog has been a little quiet, but I've been busier than ever writing freelance as well as technical writing at the day job. But fear not... I have many reviews to release over this summer. Stay tuned!

Twig Wine for Nomacorc

My latest piece for the Nomacorc Blog is up, a short piece on a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo often referred to as "twig wine". It's a fun bottle that I've enjoyed over the years and I was glad to share it for this assignment.

Twig Wine: Cantina Zaccagnini Montepulciano d’Abruzzo

Lean Manufacturing for Nomacorc

Many people wonder what I do for a living when I'm not trying wine and food together, and while I don't go into specifics due to media policies at my employer, I can talk a bit about the concepts of quality assurance in an article for the synthetic cork factory called Nomacorc:

Getting the Muda out of Your Gemba: Lean Manufacturing at Nomacorc

The title of the article sounds cryptic but a big part of Lean Six Sigma and related efficiency philosophies is that you start learning some Japanese and begin integrating the phrases into your everyday conversation.

North Carolina Winemaking for Nomacorc

My latest post is live on the Nomacorc Blog:

Stomping Grapes with the Tar Heels: Regional Spotlight on North Carolina

It was fun interviewing the winemakers remotely, which is why the only North Carolina wines I've tried have been from The Biltmore Estate.

P.S. Check out Wine Turtle for a roundup of the 103 Best Wine Blogs. Your humble correspondent plus a bunch of other friends and great writers are represented!

2012 Avalon Cabernet Sauvignon with Nomacorc Select Bio Enclosure

It's very unusual that a wine sample shows up with packaging that talks about the cork (much less an extra, un-stoppered cork for comparison). This Cabernet Sauvignon from Avalon is the first bottling in the United States to use the Nomacorc Select Bio synthetic cork.

(Disclaimer: On the side, I write for the Nomacorc Blog, but this post is not sponsored by them.)

Last February I got to see a lot of the behind-the-scenes work on the development of Select Bio, from how it is manufactured from sugar cane to the end result: a recyclable polymer product that has a zero carbon footprint.

As I've discussed on previous posts, the Nomacorc technology is developed around specific rates of oxygen transfer for the proper development of a specific wine, along with the elimination of the threat of TCA contamination (a "corked" wine). The Select Bio line moves even further with the added environmental benefits, which are becoming more and more important to consumers in the American and global marketplace.

Avalon is one of the marques of the Purple Wine Company, whose products I've reviewed once or twice. This move to the use of Select Bio fits in with their Green Initiative.

2012 Avalon "CAB" Cabernet Sauvignon
California
76% Cabernet Sauvignon, 13% Syrah, 7% Zinfandel and 4% Merlot
$12, 13.8% abv.

The wine opens up quickly with rich aromas of plum and strawberry, the latter being a little surprising for the grape blend. On the palate it shows mild tannins, big fruit, and a gentle finish. It's easily drinkable and I paired it with a savory roast beef sandwich. At the price it's a good bargain, and definitely a wine that is ready to drink now. Plus, the use of such a precisely engineered synthetic cork is going to eliminate a lot of the bottle variation that you can encounter from case to case. Enjoy this one with burgers or pizza in the middle of the week, and take a moment to appreciate the science that went into the enclosure.

Note: This wine was provided as a sample for review.

Nomacorc & Lean Manufacturing

My day job is in quality assurance. It's not a topic I talk about a lot here--I'm very engaged in the subject and it keeps the lights on at Casa de Benito, but it doesn't apply much to the kind of wine and food that I write about most often.

That's not to say that philosophies like Lean Six Sigma don't have a place in the world of food and beverages, it's just that you see the greatest implementations in mass-produced factory brands. My own home cooking is wildly inefficient, delicious, yet often inconsistent because I'm constantly tinkering with recipes. Your neighborhood baker can focus on making a dozen baguettes and a few hundred cookies without employing efficiency strategies, but the supplier for a national chain of grocery stores is going to have to use the Japanese-inspired manufacturing techniques that have been refined over the past forty years. Concepts like kaizen (continuous improvement) and 5S (sort, straighten, shine, standardize, sustain).

The macrobrew beer industry has fully embraced this, which is why every Budweiser you taste anywhere will taste exactly the same, and through a commitment to quality improvement, the amount of water required to make the beer goes down every year. Not just the water used in brewing, but all of the water used for cleaning the facility and preparing ingredients. More detail on the efficiency of the modern beer industry is available in my review of the industry book Beer Is Proof God Loves Us.

Wine is a little different, and often gets treated more like art than science. A lot of people lose money making amazing wine. Outstanding producers often have small patches of land that are unique and beautiful but can't really scale up to industrial production. Serious wines have characteristics that depend on the weather in the summer and how a certain volcano eroded ten million years ago. On the bargain side, it is possible to make mass produced, industrial wine. There's lots of it on the market and, although you don't read a lot about it, those jug/box wines keep many wine shops in business while the customers showing up looking for single vineyard Viognier only show up once in a blue moon.

Not every Cabernet Sauvignon needs to taste the same, and we can still enjoy the fact that a difference of a few miles will determine how your white Burgundy shows in the glass. But there are elements of wine production that can benefit from quality assurance while still delivering a product with artistic integrity. Here I am returning to my February visit to the Nomacorc factory in North Carolina. The factory holds many Six Sigma awards as well as multiple quality certifications. Their impact on the wine world is not to make every wine on the market taste the same, but to ensure that every individual bottling of a specific wine is free from the variation (and potential spoilage) due to the random performance of traditional corks. Moving beyond that goal, the company works to match the perfect cork with the desired oxygen transfer rate needed by the wine in question.

How do you figure that out? It takes some time. The above photo shows the development of the Nomacorc over twenty years, demonstrating how that commitment to kaizen takes the product from a relatively simple alternative enclosure to a highly sophisticated and technically superior choice over the traditional cork. From the labeling of bins and floor markers to the signs about 5S compliance to the tester who would plug a bottle and show you exactly how many Newtons of force were required to pull the cork to the engineers who perform testing on all of the raw materials, the factory is a model of modern lean manufacturing.

We got to try a couple of wines for a controlled experiment, starting with a Hungarian Chardonnay. Our group sampled the same wine from bottles enclosed with three different Nomacorcs. Each one was a little different, and I think most of us enjoyed the middle option that wasn't too bright or too restrained. Opinions also varied on a Cabernet Franc presented in the same way. The synthetic cork with the most oxygen transfer would probably be the most welcoming in a restaurant situation (soft and fruit forward), but I enjoy how that particular tannic grape opens up over time, so I preferred the enclosure with the least oxygen transmission. The Nomacorc technology allows the winemaker to select the perfect synthetic cork for the desired presentation.

A quick note on these tastings: the comparisons against different types of Nomacorcs are very useful, but comparisons against natural cork are difficult due to the wide variation introduced. Comparing against things like agglomerated corks is easier due to the fact that TCA contamination tends to spread out evenly amongst an entire production run. Screwcaps--and I'm a big fan of them for "drink now" table wines--also present their own problems with consistency when it comes to oxygen transfer over time.

It is possible to introduce science and modern quality assurance into the world of wine without sacrificing the art. From everything that I heard at Nomacorc, glass bottles are wildly unpredictable (and their corks are designed to work within a wide delta of internal neck diameter). There are probably efficiencies of labeling and shipping that are already happening behind the scenes. While we embrace the tradition and romance of the old ways of making wine, it is important to take advantage of modern technology that can deliver a better and more enjoyable wine experience for everyone.

Note: This trip was sponsored by Nomacorc. All opinions are my own.

Introduction to Nomacorc Synthetic Corks

Catgut.

It is perhaps the least mellifluous word in the English language, and fares even worse once you know that the term designated the state of the art for guitar strings and surgical sutures for centuries. When you needed to stitch up a wound or play a stringed instrument, your best bet was to use part of the lower GI tract of a farm animal (not cats, but more cattle and sheep and whatnot) and hope for the best. Now there are synthetic substitutes for those products, and you rarely if ever hear someone in the E.R. requesting to be sewn up with traditional catgut.

In the wine industry, the accepted traditional packaging method comes from the 17th century: a glass bottle with a piece of tree bark shoved in it to keep the wine safe and let it breathe and mature over a few years. The problem with natural cork is that there is a high level of variability. Purchase a case of wine, let it rest for five years. Statistically, one bottle will be bad due to cork problems (TCA contamination or oxidation or leakage), and the remaining eleven bottles will vary somewhat depending on how much oxygen has reached the inner contents. Other enclosures have their own problems, as wines can suffer from too much or too little oxygen.

Nomacorc was founded by a Belgian wine lover named Gert Noël who found such a failure rate of 6-12% unacceptable, and given modern manufacturing standards, it's amazing that the wine business has gone this long with such numbers. He partnered with his son's North Carolina foam manufacturing company (Nomaco) that makes things like pool noodles, and thus Nomacorc was born. As with catgut, perhaps there is a better technology out there, even if it's not the traditional solution.

The product has evolved over the years and the company now controls 13% of the world cork market. (Not the synthetic cork market, all cork-shaped enclosures, since most of the other synthetic producers are now gone.) The company has operations in Belgium, Argentina, China, and of course, North Carolina. There are a few standard products, though custom synthetic corks can be produced, and all offer custom printing.

The photo at top depicts the current state of the art product: Select Bio, which is produced from polymers derived from Brazilian sugar cane production. Note the beveled edges, which prevent a "lipping" problem present in early versions of the synthetic cork. Note also that from across a room, you're probably not going to be able to tell that the cork isn't "natural" (even though it's derived from sugar cane).

While the company is the exclusive provider of corks used for Barefoot and Yellowtail still wines sold in the United States, the company is touting its expertise in oxygen transfer management to appeal to the higher end, even collectible market. While at the factory, we got to meet Ben Mayo, the winemaker at Paso Robles' Eberle Winery and an early adopter of the Nomacorc. He said that over the years, he's had no complaints from customers about the switch to synthetic, aside from one fan who had made a trivet from Nomacorcs and was surprised when they melted under a hot casserole dish.

Mayo brought along a bottle of his 2003 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the first elite vintages to be enclosed with synthetic corks. This bottle (released at $70, now going for $250), smelled and tasted remarkably young. Full of deep black fruit aromas, touches of leather and cedar, and free of obvious flaws. Not too young, but impressively stable and yet apparent that it will continue to improve over the next 5-10 years. Additionally, the synthetic cork was in great shape. The current batches of Nomacorcs are designed to provide specific oxygenation: different grapes and styles of wine require different rates of oxygen transfer over specific periods of time, and there are tools that the company has developed to find the perfect synthetic cork style for each bottling.

The science behind this whole operation is fascinating, and I'll have more details in my future posts about the winery tour. Stay tuned!

Note: This trip was sponsored by Nomacorc. All opinions are my own.