Zork Results

We had a great time with the Zork closure survey. The on-line vote was 78% for and 22% against. The tasting room survey customers voted 90% for the Zork and 10% against it. So, I guess it looks better when you can see it up close and play with it. Some of the "yes" voters had rave comments like, "It's awesome!" "It's easy to use!" "It's a great idea!" and "Why didn't someone think of it sooner?" Some people's yes's had qualifiers like, "but not in red, only black or maroon," and "for emergency use only." The no voters had comments like, "too much plastic" and "too hard to open." Great things for us to take into consideration. The plastic is recycle-able and a kind customer showed me how it can be opened easily.

Tim and I decided we will use the Zork for our spring bottling of our 2007 Chardonnay. We will survey the people who buy it and then consider where to go from there.

Thank you all for participating! Joan

Screw the cork or Zork the cork?

From the beginning we had planned to use screw caps as the closure for our wines. Corks were a great improvement over sealing wax and cotton plugs a few hundred years ago, but there are more consistent alternatives these days. Small guys like us just can't afford to sacrifice 5-10% of our wine to the spoilage that accompanies corks. But we couldn't swing the cost of the screw cap machine with everything else we need and we already had the gear to stuff corks in a bottle, so for the next year or two we are buying the cleanest corks we can and keeping our fingers crossed. Along comes the Zork closure - a new fangled idea from Australia. Joan told me to check them out a few months ago, but I paid no attention until Will returned from Australia and sent me a photo and testimonial. The technical data confirm it has no risk of cork taint as might be expected from a plastic device, and is more like a screw cap that a cork in terms of oxygen ingress and premature aging of wines. Maybe we'll try a few hundred and see how they fair in the tasting room. Check them out at: http://www.zorkusa.com