Consumer preference for screw caps versus corks

In the modern world there is a very large proportion of wine bottles sealed with screw caps rather than corks. Well, I come from Australia, where the screw caps were first popularized, and so this is a topic worth having a look at. This is easy to do using the Closure Survey that the Aluminium Closures Group produces every few years, which will give us an idea of how well the consumers elsewhere are taking to them.

As Wikipedia explains, a screw cap is a metal cap, normally aluminium, that screws onto threads on the neck of a wine bottle, with a thin layer of plastic (often PVDC), cork, rubber, or other soft material used to make a seal with the mouth of the bottle. The idea is to avoid the problems that sometimes occur with oxidation taint of wines bottled with a cork.

The cap was developed at the end of the 1960s at the request of the Australian wine company Yalumba, which then started using them commercially from 1976. However, neither Australian nor New Zealand customers took to them straight away, and so the caps faded away during the 1980s. They made a comeback in both countries during the 1990s; and in this century have become the norm there, also spreading popularly to other places such as the United Kingdom.

We can look at their recent acceptance by consumers in six European countries by looking at the Closure Survey Results 2024. [There are copies of the report available in several languages.] The survey (conducted by the market research institute Censuswide) takes place every five years, and so the graph here shows the results for the latest three surveys. It looks at the preference for the screw caps versus the corks.

As you can see, somewhat more than one-third of the 6,000 consumers surveyed actually preferred screw caps through time, with about the same preferring corks, although the latter decreased through time. Somewhat fewer people had no stated preference.

Screw caps were greatly preferred in Germany and the UK, with corks being greatly preferred in France and Italy. The Spaniards had no preference. Males seemed to prefer corks, although this was decreasing through time, with females preferring screw caps.

The stated reasons for choosing the screw cap were that the bottle was quick and easy to open (no corkscrew necessary), and there is a better wine taste / quality. Alternatively, better wine taste / breathing / aging were the reasons for preferring cork. People seemed to be expecting that the screw caps would prevail in the future.

Sadly, screw caps are often seen by wine companies as being preferable for cheaper wines, with corks being preferred for the more expensive ones. As one simple Australian example, Penfolds bottles their shiraz wines with a screw cap for Koonunga Hill ($15) and Bin 28 ($30) and a cork for Bin 128 ($40) and St Henri ($80). This is very old-fashioned!