If you've been paying attention in the last six months, you've noticed that perfectly good wine is being served in bottles without natural corks. In fact, some otherwise worthy wine has, horrors, screwcaps!

Corksniffers Advisory: sniffing a screwcap is bad form.

.but sniffing corks was just as silly, if for different reasons.

Not because the wine in a screwcap bottle isn't worth the perusal. In fact, some of them are great.

Got a problem with that? Well, get over it. Or as Randall Grahm, proprietor of leading edge winery Bonny Doon likes to say, "get totally screwed." Some of Bonny Doon's new bottlings have POS that offer exactly that temptation and the winery often uses screwcaps instead of corks.

Grahm's intention is dishonorable - he merely intends to sell you a bottle of wine. The temptation is based upon a dare. Imagine a bottle of wine that is good and yet that comes with a screwcap/

We all know there's nothing pre-determined when it comes to the closure for a bottle of wine. Great wines are great regardless of the bottle they arrive in, the kind of cork that closes the bottle is merely a matter of luck. Will it hold or not?

The cork industry gladly allows that three to five percent of its product is bad. That's to say, three to five percent of all corks make a wine taste off. As my friend Peter Granoff likes to say, "What other industry would tolerate such a failure rate?!?" Oh, that would be Microsoft.

But I digress. Many of Australia's best Riesling producers (and that's not an oxymoron, moron) are closing their wines with screwcaps New Zealand wine producers have embraced the screwcap completely - you can expect most high quality white wines from that country to be closed with a stelvin closure. "Stelvin"? Oh, that's technolingo for screwcap.

Consider this. New Zealand , as a country, receives the highest dollar figure for its wine of any country in the world. So are they risking everything? No.

"I want to use stelvins to close my bottles," says winemaker Michael Brakjovich MW of New Zealand great Kumeu River. Why? The reasons are simple; at least three percent (and sometimes much more) of corks are tainted with cardboard-smelling TCA. The cork industry can't seem to fix the problem; and stelvin closures, I mean screwcaps, work.

No muss, no fuss, no cardboard aromas, and the wine ages well. Brakjovich was touring the world last year showing wines he had closed with standard corks compared with the same wines closed with screwcaps.

The difference was obvious; not just by taste, not just by aroma, but even by the look of the wine. All of the screwcap wines looked younger, whether red or white wine.

So why is this news? Why shouldn't we, as an industry, embrace this closure? After all, corks are imperfect and inconsistent. Advocates for corks, such as legendary winemaker Ed Sbragia of Beringer Blass Wine Estates, prefer that inconsistency to the youthful and raw character of screwcap wine. Sbragia has told me, in no uncertain terms, that he prefers the roundness of wines closed with a cork to wines closed with a screwcap.

This is not so different from Brakjovich's experience. In the tasting I attended in Austria last summer, the crowd clearly preferred the cork finished Cabernet to the screwcap Cabernet. Why? Because it was more evolved and rounder. The oxygen latent inside a cork, molecular but significant, changes and softens red wines.

With wines destined for long aging, this may be important. Corks may be the closure LEAST suited for long cellaring. And screwcaps make a red wine seem more youthful. Emilie Peynaud, the great enologist, uttered the dictum, "the best way to grow old gracefully is to stay young as long as possible."

Screwcaps do that. So why the resistance? Who is resistant? Not customers, in my experience. Customers all have a great laugh when a screwcap wine arrives at the table. I give the wine my recommendation and the wine is tasted and judged on its own merits. There is even, I suspect, a predisposition to like the wine.

You see, people are fed up with the attitude surrounding wine. Corks? Corks require screwpulls, or waiter corkscrews, or those two handled monstrosities that most of us were raised trying to use to open a bottle.

Who has something against screwcaps? Mostly wine stewards. Restaurant managers. People who feel that their net worth is based upon their exclusionary abilities with wine and wine bottles. I won't name names.

What does it say about our industry that we need to train people to gain access to our products. Until recently, unless someone teaches you how to use a corkpuller, you can't drink any wine worth the name.

That's crazy. Some of my relatives have arthritis and can't open wine unless it's in a twist-off bottle. Those same relatives are ecstatic that good wine is in a screwcap bottle.

So am I. Wine is too good for people, too wholesome of character, too rich in personality, too flavorful and exciting, too healthful to be the province of the rich and the specialized, Though I question whether screwcaps can elevate wine to a more prominent place at the American table, I believe this - it's a start.