America’s Largest Online Wine Retailer Data Indicates the More Highly Rated the Wine, the More Likely it is Closed with a Cork
New York, NY, March 6, 2023 – According to publicly available data from America’s largest online wine retailer Wine.com, the more expensive the wine, the more likely that it is closed with a cork stopper. The data also reveals that as the price of a wine decreases, the probability that it will be closed with an artificial material increases.
Since price, however, is not necessarily a synonym for quality in wine, another question would be if even the higher quality wines in lower price categories are disproportionately closed with cork stoppers. Data available from Wine.com‘s website shows that the most highly-scored wines are, in fact, likely to be closed with cork stoppers; whatever the price point, cork lends itself to be used by more winemakers at the premium, super-premium, and icon spectrums for quality and price.
Wine.com is the largest online seller of wine in the United States. In New York State, as of July 2022, it showed 12,589 available wines. Amongst the higher-growth price points, the inventory includes 6,596 wines priced above $30, where only 4% of the wines are closed with a metal screw cap but not a single one rated the highest possible score. In the $20 to $30 category, over 90% of the highest rate wines are closed with cork. Even in the low-growth, low-priced segments, cork ranks as much as 80% of the top-rated wines.
Based on this data, it can be understood that the higher the quality of the wine in every price range, the higher probability that the winemaker has chosen cork to seal the bottle. The data also clearly shows the correlation between the perceived tasted quality and the choice of cork; this would indicate that winemakers choose cork because it equates to a higher quality wine. The data also shows that the best decision a novice consumer can make when choosing a wine to purchase out of the thousands available on the shelf is to choose a wine sealed with a cork.
The choice of closure is seen more and more as the ultimate oenological decision, as winemakers depend on cork’s unique properties to protect the wine, while using the closure’s natural low oxygen transfer rate to allow it to evolve and mature inside the bottle. Combined with cork’s unbeatable sustainability credentials, this understanding of cork as the ultimate wine closure goes a long way to explain why one in seven wine bottles sealed around the world feature a cork stopper.
About 100% Cork
100% Cork is an educational communications campaign about wine cork stoppers. The mission of the campaign is to provide the wine industry and consumers with the latest information and research on the benefits of natural cork. The campaign was established by the Portuguese Cork Association (APCOR) with support from the Cork Quality Council to increase awareness of the unique qualities and sustainability of natural cork.
About APCOR
Associação Portuguesa da Cortiça (APCOR) represents and promotes the Portuguese cork industry and its products. APCOR is the employers’ association of national scope, created in 1956 and is based in Santa Maria de Lamas, at the heart of the cork industry around 30 kilometers from Porto, Portugal’s second largest city. Membership of the association is open to all companies operating in the fields of production, marketing or export of cork products. The organization advocates on behalf of the Portuguese cork industry worldwide and is the driving force of an industry based on tradition, innovation and sustainability.
Price does not equal quality. Dozens of studies support that view.
The ranking in Wine.com is not reputable, it is not blind or double blind tastings. The very wealthy cork families spend a lot of money to produce articles like this that do not bear close scrutiny. The consumer has a bias and is seeing the closure.
Paul Vandenberg
Paradisos del Sol
To clarify the data: the rankings used from Wine.com were aggregated scores from professional wine critics, not consumers. Wine.com allows filtering by closure type (screw caps) and by critics’ scores. In each price category, the highest rated 100 wines were considered, and the data showed that cork stoppers closed a much higher share of those top 100 wines than for the category as a whole.
100% Cork Campaign
Professional wine critic
Definition; somebody with no training who sells words.
If wine is not tasted blind, the evaluation is worthless.
Paul Vandenberg
Paradisos del Sol