For many years, wine industry experts have debated the ideal closure for wine bottles (cork, synthetic or screwcap).which is better at preserving the wine's quality throughout the bottle-aging process and thereby ensuring consumer satisfaction in a way that's friendly to the environment?  

Today's screwcaps address four major market concerns:

•  Eliminating completely the cork taint that causes a significant volume of product within the industry to be unfit for consumption
• Combating the premature oxidation of wine caused by the excessive permeability of certain corks;
•  Ensuring consistent quality from one bottle to the next, for both the producer and the consumer;
• Obtaining a sustainable, environmentally friendly form of consumption. 

Screwcaps : a life cycle analysis

Recently published studies show that the bottle closing accounts for between 0.5% and 1.5% of a wine bottle's carbon footprint—intrinsically just a small share of the carbon emissions tied to wine consumption.  Alcan Packaging has been active since 2005 in developing a sustainability index, dubbed ASSET™, that incorporates the three pillars of sustainable development (its social, economic and environmental dimensions). This sustainability index, similar in approach to France's Bilan Carbone®, or Carbon Balance, programme, offers a tool for performing a comprehensive analysis of a product's lifecycle from beginning to end, i.e., from the supplier of the raw materials to the consumer, including the end of the product's life, in accordance with the internationally recognized ISO 14040 guidelines. 

The Stelvin® capsule eliminates the environmental impact resulting from defects in certain wine caps...

The growing use of screwcaps in the wine industry has made it possible to eliminate the cork taint created by TCA, a chemical that is naturally present in cork. The market for screwcaps this year totalled about three billion bottles worldwide.  It is estimated that 5-7% of bottles are defective because of the use of certain closures. We can therefore assume that about 150 to 250 million bottles could have been preserved and consumed without incident in 2008 instead of being destroyed and "poured down the sink"—an undeniable example of waste that will be unacceptable for future sustainable consumption. 

Waste...

The wine industry offers a potential market of about 18 billion bottles worldwide, including some 15 billion bottles for which a screwcap is not used.The environmental impact of the number of bottles destroyed out of these 15 billion is a significant factor in the CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere unnecessarily in order to produce, bottle and package wine and transport it to the consumer.   

On behalf of sustainable development...

The Stelvin® screwcap addresses four major concerns in the market. An increasing number of producers who are mindful of customer satisfaction are now using the Stelvin® capsule, made of 100% recyclable aluminium, for their best wines. The Stelvin® is guaranteed to prevent cork taint and eliminate the risk of premature oxidation while ensuring complete consistency from one bottle to the next.