As the recent online survey on the excellent Dr Vino blog has demonstrated rather well (IMHO), it’s very hard to pick one single person who deserves to win this award. So my vote goes to a thing, not a person. And that thing is the screwcap . 10 years ago cork was performing pretty badly. Cork taint was a big issue, and the Australians were also getting cross about a phenomenon called random oxidation, caused by the variable nature of oxygen... 

Really pleased to get a chance to try this wine, because it’s an important one. It’s the Clare Valley Semillon 1999, made by Kerri Thompson at Leasingham, which was the wine used in the now famous Australian Wine Research Institute Closures Trial. In this trial, the same wine was bottled using fourteen different closures, including this one – the tin/saran-lined screwcap. The significance of this trial? In the years that followed,...