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Comment by valisystem | Hacker News Reader

Your hell will be plastic foam corks. And those win hands up for medium duration of storage : they have some of the properties of the classic corks and let the wine breath a little (twists tops do not), with no disadvantages.

They are used more and more in low-mid range of wines in France, and nobody complains about it.

Still it does not cut it for more than a year or two of storage.

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Yes, always disappointed when a plastic cork is revealed, a lousy glass usually follows, followed by pouring the rest down the drain.

Of course, 4 or 5 Euros in France usually does the trick for table wine (with a real cork to boot); imagine in the States the same bottle will run $25+

You can usually find decent French wines in the States for $12-15 if you shop at the right places. Most wine specialty stores tend to overprice (and at restaurants they'll easily run $30-50).

I don't like the plastic corks myself, they seem inordinately hard to pull out of the bottle.

I complain about plastic corks, and I wish the low-end French wines would switch to screw-caps. Plastic corks tend to fail under any kind of environmental stress, and they are hard on corkscrews. No one keeps that kind of wine longer than 6-12 months anyway, so in my view they have no advantages over a screw-top. Germany and New Zealand see this.

But plastic corks will probably stick around, because they seem to give folks the illusion that they are doing something special when they open the bottle.

I opened a 2007 with a synthetic cork a couple nights ago. It was great. I can't say if they hold up well for decades, but I've encountered no problems with them in the <10 year time scale.

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