I’ll admit, I’m a huge fan of the screw cap / twist off wines! It’s just so convenient, and I don’t have to worry about a corked wine… or forgetting a wine opener if I’m out on a picnic! Even the fake corks are just plain annoying, as they’re so dense that it’s very difficult to get them off your wine opener once they’re out of the bottle. I’m a firm believer that screw cap is in no way an indicator on quality. I’ve had twist offs that were great and awful, which is the same experience I’ve had with plastic and real corks.

So, I hope to see more wineries switch to screw caps in the future — as well as for wine snobs to get over their obsession with the cork.

In the spirit of screw caps, I’ve started a new tagging category – Screw cap – for all the Wine Shindig posts. If any wine is a screw cap, I’ll be sure to tag so if you’re looking for a screw cap wine to take on a picnic, you can easily go to that category and peruse those posts specifically.

A few great screw caps wines I’d recommend include:

• Angeline Pinot Noirs – Russian River Valley and others (California)
• Big Fire Pinot Noir (Oregon)
• Wirra Wirra Church Block Cabernet Sauvignon (Australia)
• Oyster Bay Pinot Noir (New Zealand)
• Starborough Sauvignon Blanc (New Zealand)
• The Post Stones (South Africa)

Food & Wine editor Lettie Teague has an excellent article about screw caps wines. She makes some great points that screw caps do have a few potential failings, such as leakage. In addition, wine experts aren’t exactly sure how wines will age underneath a screw cap. Lucky for me, I’m not collecting anything so fancy at this point that it’s going to last for that long! I am interested to see how that evaluation goes in about 15+ years. On the bright side, at least you can store your screw caps vertically, instead of worrying with the horizontal storage irritation.