E-ZPass Corks

Worried about identity theft? Imagine being the maker of an “investment grade” wine such as Bordeaux’s Chateau Latour or Napa Valley’s Screaming Eagle. In prime vintages, they can fetch thousands of dollars a bottle at auction.It should come as no surprise, then, that fraudulent bottles are increasingly circulating in the stratosphere of the wine marketplace. Print up a false label, brand a clean cork with the great name, duplicate the foil wrap, and the rest is relatively easy. Easiest of all is faking the wine. If it doesn’t quite fit the anticipated flavor profile, well, just chalk it up to the vagaries of the game.A high-tech parry against fake wines was demonstrated last Tuesday at the restaurant Eleven Madison Park by the Italian duo of Arnaldo Caprai, a much-honored Umbrian winery, and Smartcorq, an orange-tinted artificial cork with a silicon transponder for a brain. Smartcorq can store technical information about the wine in the bottle, such as harvest dates, probable maturity, even food pairing suggestions. Most importantly, Smartcorq can be programmed with a tamper-proof bottle ID code. A fixed or portable reader downloads the data to a computer, PDA, or mobile telephone. Pulling out the Smartcorq destroys the memory chip.Smartcorq uses radio frequency ID technology, the same as in the E-ZPass and in the American Express Blue card. Wal-Mart requires its top 100 suppliers to use RFID inventory control tags on all shipments. Arnaldo Caprai is the first to bring RFID into the winery.The winemaker and owner of Arnaldo Caprai, Marco Caprai, made his name in the mid-1990s by reviving the spicy, intense Sagrantino di Montefalco, an almost-extinct local red wine grape. But it’s a new wine called Contemporare 2003, made from 100% sangiovese, with which Mr. Caprai has chosen to introduce Smartcorq, custommade for him by the Bolognese firm LabID. To be introduced in New York in June, Contemporare will be priced at $35.“When the LabID people first came to me, their idea was to use Smartcorq as a way to keep thieves from stealing my wine from retail shelves,” Mr. Caprai said. “I told them, it’s fine with me if my wine gets stolen. I’ll just sell more.” The upshot was that Mr. Caprai decided it would “fun” to create a sort of genetic code in the chip. But Contemporare’s synthetic cork is only a first step, and it’s unlikely to find favor with high-end wine-makers. But once the Smartcorq technology can be embedded in a real cork, the days of counterfeit bottles will be numbered.TO BE OR NOT TO BE ROMANEE-CONTI Of all the wines to whet a crooked palate, the legendary burgundy called Romanee-Conti ranks highest. Magnificent quality, centuries of pedigree, and a tiny production of about 400 cases a year make Romanee-Conti the most expensive wine on the auction market. Last Thursday at Christie’s in Rockefeller Center, a six-bottle case of magnums (double a normal bottle) of Romanee Conti, vintage 1985, reached the highest price ever paid for a case of wine at auction: $170,375. That’s more than $28,000 a bottle.To fetch such a price, the provenance of that lot of Romanee-Conti had to be impeccable. It isn’t always so. Wine writer Ed Mc-Carthy told me of having once been on hand for the opening of a double magnum of Romanee-Conti, vintage 1945. “It tasted awfully young for what it was supposed to be,” Mr. McCarthy says. In fact, when he checked later with the winery, he learned that it wasn’t what it was supposed to be. No double magnums of Romanee-Conti had been bottled in 1945. Whoever counterfeited that wine is surely not rooting for the advent of smart corks.CORKS, PRO AND CON According to a newly released survey commissioned by Portuguese cork makers, 94% of wine consumers think that non-cork closures such as screwcaps and synthetic corks “cheapen” a bottle of wine. Among restaurant servers surveyed, 71% still prefer corks over screwcaps and only 3% preferred synthetic corks. Too bad the respondents didn’t include winemakers, because a different picture would have emerged. Screwcaps are rapidly replacing corks on New World white wines, whose freshness is most easily turned nasty by the chemical TCA, the dreaded cork taint. Many high-end New World red wines are also being screwcapped, including new vintages by New Zealand’s top pinot noir maker, Felton Road.The stubborn presence of TCA, which to some degree affects up to 10% of all corks, is no respecter of hallowed names – not even presumably well-vetted bottles on the table of the mighty critic Robert Parker. In recent postings on his Hedonist’s Gazette, available onerobertparker.com(subscription required), Mr. Parker notes that at a recent dinner to benefit a scholarship in his name at the Culinary Institute of America, two bottles of the vaunted Marcassin 2000 Chardonnay, among America’s priciest, were both “badly corked.” At another dinner last December, “the problem of TCA or badly corked bottles reared its head too frequently.” One culprit was Paul Jaboulet-Aine’s Hermitage “La Chapelle” 1961, a legendary wine that might still have been glorious were it not corked.I’m traditional in my attachment to the hallowed uncorking ritual at the dinner table. I love the mushroomy smell of old corks. But better a screwtop or synthentic closure than a spoiled wine, especially one that ought to be a treasure. Best of all would be a closure that guarantees the wine in the bottle is the real thing.FREE TASTING Ten “natural” wine makers from France will be pouring their wines at Astor Wines (399 Lafayette St. at East 4th Street, 212-674-7500) from 2 to 5 p.m. on Saturday, March 11. Natural wines are as chemical-free as possible in the vineyard, made with natural yeasts, and subject to minimal intervention.

E-ZPass Corks

E-ZPass Corks

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