I gained a friend at a party last weekend thanks to an embarrassingly nerdy discussion we had about, of all things, storage. (I promise I am not usually such a dweeb at parties, but I was standing around with a handful of Internet and high tech types.) My new friend was delving deep into the intricacies of archiving film and video, which I was surprised is not as easy as copying onto a big hard drive. As she was wrapping up by citing some technologies that look promising, but haven’t been time tested, I got to thinking about wine.

“That sounds like the great cork debate,” I said. To follow my logic, click here:

And it’s true: many quality wineries have been switching to plastic stoppers and screw caps for better storage. In the case of wine, it’s to avoid cork taint, the musty-tasting degradation caused by corks that affects a lot – some say as much as 10 percent – of bottles in the market.

I’d been thinking fondly about screw tops recently, because for some reason I’ve opened a streak of corked bottles over the past few months, the latest being a 2004 Frank Family cabernet sauvignon that I paid $70 for at a fancy steak house the night before I had this conversation with the film archivist. Actually, this was the second tainted bottle of this same wine I’d tasted since February. Twice bitten, I’m beginning to think the poor Frank folks ended up with a whole shipment of bad corks. When will they finally go through them all? It leaves me with a sad feeling: how could all those beautiful grapes, and all that good will and careful winemaking, go into a bottle, only to be sealed with the kiss of death?

It seems as if synthetic stoppers would be the way to go; who would deliberately risk messing up 10 percent of her winery’s production? But the problem with plastic corks and screw-tops—along with the fact that they’re about as aesthetically appealing as a toilet bowl flapper — is that they’ve not been time tested. Like new film and video storage technology, simply because it’s innovative, nobody’s been able to test a 50 year old Chateau Lafitte stopped with a screw top versus one with a cork.

Then my new friend added another cause for thought: all plastics, she said, degrade. She’d be surprised if a plastic cork didn’t throw off by-products as it (and the wine it’s touching) aged. Even a metal screw top would probably be lined with plastic, she added, so you’d face the same problem with that option.

Since I’m not a snob or a traditionalist about wine, and since I drink most of my wine before I’d have to worry about an alternative closure failing, I’ve never had an issue with these newfangled stoppers. But now I’m rethinking. The winemaker at Sokol Blosser made me rethink even more. Write if you’re a also a nerd chemist and have something to add about my new friend’s concerns.