GOODBYE, CORKS Eveline Fraser, senior winemaker at New Zealand’s Cloudy Bay Vineyards, opened the 20th vintage of her winery’s iconic sauvignon blanc, vintage 2005, at Nobu one day earlier this month. Before, she’d always have done it with a corkscrew.This time, holding the bottle’s base in her left hand, Ms. Fraser deftly twisted the top with her right, and voila! With a crisp cracking sound, off came a gray aluminum screw cap.

By and large, the screw cap revolution, now rapidly gaining momentum, has been led by modestly priced, mainly white wines from the Southern Hemisphere. The most prestigious wineries have been lagging. Theirs are the wines most likely to be served at expensive restaurants whose clientele still expects the ritual of uncorking, not unscrewing, to be performed tableside by a server wielding an old-fashioned, lever-action corkscrew. Cloudy Bay’s sauvignon blanc is a mainstay of high-end wine lists. So why is it being converted to screw caps now? Because three years of blind tastings at Cloudy Bay, confirming numerous other studies, have showed that that the chemical compound TCA, commonly called cork taint, was ruining up to 10% of its wines. Or, more frequently and insidiously, merely robbing them of their edge of freshness.TCA seems able to infect the cork when it is bark on the tree, when it is manufactured, and in the winery.”TCA is totally random,” Ms. Fraser explained. “You don’t get less of it in more expensive wines. I was paying up to one New Zealand dollar (equal to U.S. 70 cents) for the best corks, and we didn’t see any difference in the percentage of bad ones. So you can’t buy a better cork.”

Indeed, when Ms. Fraser opened a bottle of Cloudy Bay’s Pinot Noir 2003 at Nobu,it had the “wet cardboard”aroma and taste of TCA.A backup bottle was just fine, evoking classic black cherries, herbs, and spice. It’s bad enough to have a $10 bottle turn out to be corked. Even worse is to find a $28 bottle, like this pinot noir, to be ruined. Next year, all Cloudy Bay wines will arrive in America with screw caps. The wine Ms. Fraser meant you to have will be the wine you’ll get.

HARVEST REPORT (BEAUTIFUL) Though French wine imports are dreary,the 2005 harvest dazzled in the key French wine regions. Summer began with a blast of heat, but by August, conditions were blessedly moderate and dry. Some localized rain fell in September, as the harvest began, but did no harm. “The harvesters worked with great serenity,” a Loire Valley spokesperson, Benoit Roumet, reports. “Our first tastings of both red and white wines showed off elegant aromas, power, and body.” In Burgundy, the American wine blogger Bill Nanson (burgundy-report.com), who picked grapes himself in the region, reported that with 90% of the crop harvested, and excepting a few hailed areas, “the fruit seems to be in great shape.”And in bellweather Bordeaux, still the French wine production powerhouse, ecstasy reigns. Vincent Fabre, owner of several chateaus, wrote in an e-mail of a “beautiful optimism that this year’s quality will remain a great reference in the annals of Bordeaux quality.” At Chateau Palmer in Margaux, Phillippe Delfaut, technical director, described the must, or freshly pressed juice, as being “deep purple with amazingly pure fruit aromas.” To the taste, it has “a velvety tannic structure that is reminiscent of other truly great vintages.”

The tilt in winedom always favors the positive. But walking among the vines at several properties during my own visit to Bordeaux in early September, I saw nothing but healthy grapes hanging heavy on the vine. Even the cabernet sauvignon tasted as sweet as table grapes.The market may be hard on French wines just now, but the weather is kind.

HARVEST REPORT (BRUTAL) Long Island winemakers often claim kinship to their confreres in Bordeaux. But this year, there are no voices at the East End raised in praise of the 2005 harvest. The summer had been warm and dry, building hopes for a great vintage. Then, in mid-October, with most of the crop still on the vine, more than a week of steady rain descended, cruelly damaging the fruit. “We sustained quite a loss in crop size just as we were ready to harvest,” Bud Koehler, president of Osprey’s Dominion on the North Fork, New York’s “2005 Winery of the Year,” said.”When the rain gets on the grapes for so many days, so much of the fruit is not capable of being made into wine.” Instead of machine harvesting, pickers went through the vineyards culling the undamaged grapes. “Sugars were still very high,” Mr. Koehler said. “It’s not that the wine will be a disaster. The disaster was that so much of the crop was dropped.” A bright spot is merlot picked before the rains, which Mr. Koehler calls “beautiful.” Susan Wine, the co-owner of New York Vintage, which sells Empire state wines at two city shops and wine bars, summed up 2005: “What happened this year shows who’s in charge. And it’s not us.”

RED EARTH, RED WINE Few New World wineries can boast the longevity and sustained quality required to do what Wynns Coonawarra Estate did last Thursday in a private room at Le Bernardin: host a vertical tasting of vintages of a single wine, in this case Wynns Black Label cabernet sauvignon, going back more than half a century. The current winemaker, Sue Hodder, presented a dozen wines, beginning with the 1954 and ending with the 2001. All were unblended cabernet sauvignon.

Wynns’s vineyards are confined to a geologically unusual, mile-wide, shallow strip of rocky red volcanic soil in Coonawarra, a remote spot in South Australia. Dense, firmly structured, and long-lived “cabs” come from this soil, called “Terra Rosa.” The 1954 vintage smelled like shoe leather but in the mouth delivered waves of meaty, smoky flavor. At release, this cabernet sauvignon was a rarity during an era when most Australian (and American) wines were fortified and sweet. In deference to a vogue for white wines in the 1970s,according to Ms.Hodder, Wynns lightened up its red wine. The 1973 vintage, with a surprisingly fresh core of delicate raspberry fruit, was my favorite wine of the tasting. Typically, this is a wine of firm bones rather than soft flesh.

Wynns Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon may be a blueblood among Australian wines, but it is priced for the working stiff. The current 2001 release, almost black in color and tightly packed with curranty, black coffee flavors, is priced at $9.99 at Astor Wines. Few wines at this price point are built for the long haul, but you can count on Coonawarra to age handsomely.