Especially funny given that screw caps are inherently superior in every way except for hipster signalling.

...And for plastic caps ending up in the sea for a few centuries.

I don't know about you, but most (all?) of the screw caps I've seen are metal, not plastic.

I think the parent was commenting on how screw caps were better than the plastic "cork" style as well.

For alcohol, that's true, but most cheap wines use plastic caps around here.

Here (New Zealand) all wine at all price points, have screw caps

The ones I get are aluminum with a plastic gasket. Which is less plastic than a plastic cap, but not zero.

Well, not superior in every way.

If you don't drink a lot of wine in one sitting and have bottles that have been opened, corks seem to average out to being better for re-sealing the bottle -- specifically if you're placing them horizontally, like in a wine cooler. I've found screw caps frequently tend to leak, even over a single evening. Even with the hole from the corkscrew, the cork tends to reseal better from my experience.

With that said, I am talking about actual cork and not the plastic versions; Those will seep just as bad as screw caps.

If you like wine and don't kill bottles in one sitting, I think the preferred resealing option are those rubber stoppers held in place by vacuum. Probably regardless of original packaging.

I try to avoid having bottles sit around opened, so generally when we open one, the idea is to finish it in a day or two. The vacuum stoppers are good, but honestly, it's so much simpler to just stick the original wooden cork back in, give it a good slap to make sure it's in there, and put the bottle back in the cooler until the next evening.

If I was storing opened bottles for longer than a day or two, I'd probably make heavier use of the vacuum stoppers, but I'm in that midpoint of the spectrum where I neither need the fancy tools, but still need something more than the cheap solution.

That seems reasonable to me!

> hipster

Vinophiles are now considered 'hipsters'? Is there any less hipster crowd than uber-wealthy wine collectors, a hobby dating back generations, if not centuries?

Screw caps are superior anyway. Easier to open, easier to reseal. It's good to see some reasonable good wines adopting screw tops in spite of tradition/inertia.

They are not superior. Convenient in certain circumstances, perhaps.

For example if one cannot be bothered to use, or does not have a corkscrew handy, a screw cap might be preferred for some.

I know it is difficult for most Modern Americans to use a corkscrew. Even more difficult is being able to appreciate the complexities and effort that goes into making good, traditional wine. Best to do away with tradition for the sake of convenience.

How are they inferior?

I assume the seal in screw caps is plastic which leaves micro plastics and/or PFAS behind in your drink.

The deduction is faulty.

PFAS are a specific family of chemicals unsuitable for this application.

No significant amount of microplastics is likely to develop from the mild abrasion of opening and closing a wine bottle a handful of times. And if your risk tolerance is so low that you are worried about that largely theoretical concern, you probably should not be drinking wine at all (because we have quite concrete evidence that alcohol is unhealthy -- unlike microplastics).

I would be (much) more worried about chunks of plastic getting in my wine from those fake cork products than from screw tops.

> No significant amount of microplastics is likely to develop from the mild abrasion of opening and closing a wine bottle a handful of times.

I think research has shown that simply storing acidic foods in contact with plastic causes micro plastics to release: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37343248/

Once opened, they do not reseal as well as real cork.

This isn't a huge deal, because a separate tool made specifically for resealing wine bottles is better than either. But if you don't drink a whole bottle of wine at once, and you don't have such a tool, cork reseals better.

I have a corkscrew and am adept at using it. But I'd rather not! There is no benefit to cork.