Suppose I were to tell you that I'd come up with this brand new system that could revolutionize an industry by saving upwards of one billion dollars in spoiled product, lost profits, and packaging waste a year: a system that was easy to use, that didn't degrade the product, that was reasonably attractive, and that was based on a tried and true concept? You'd say I was a genius, right, and that I should probably become a very wealthy man indeed for having devised the strategy?

Now, suppose I reveal that my system involves the sealing of wine bottles with screw caps, or Stelvins, as the wine geeks among us have come to know them, instead of the usual cork? Still convinced I'm so brilliant? Well, look around you. How many of the millions of bottles of wine taking up shelf and bin space in the supertmarkets, restaurants, and private cellars of the world are actually leaping on this profoundly simple and effective answer to the perplexing problem of cork taint, and actually using the dang things? Not nearly enough, I can tell you.

Now, I'll admit that I was skeptical when the caps made their first appearance on the market a couple of years ago, and heard that there were all sorts of drawbacks to the technology that had to be overcome before serious producers of ageworthy red wines would be willing to leap on board, not the least of which was the tendancy for the things to leak.

A little experiment conducted during a recent visit to Australia has since convinced me otherwise. Our group of experienced tasters was presented with two bottles of the same wine, a four year old Shiraz from a critically acclaimed producer, one of which had been bottled under cork, and the other under screw cap. We knew not which was which, but were asked to taste each wine, and register our preference for one or the other.

As I tasted from one to the other, and back again, all sorts of expectations started forming themselves in my mind. Shouldn't the cork-sealed example show subtle signs of oxidation in the form of advanced maturity, earth tones, less showy fruit, for example? And shouldn't the Stelvin-capped wine, deprived as it has been of a subtle exchange of air with the outside world, betray a sort of anaerobic suspended animation? I taste, I sniff. Which wine do I prefer? The more earth-inflected one of course, the one with a hint of smoked meats, soil, and pepper. Surely the bottle with the natural cork, I surmise.

Wrongo dongo! That's the Stelvin wine, chump! And you know, the only thing that made it less embarrassing was the fact that about 75% of our flabbergasted group of winos agreed with me!

So I'm a somewhat chastened convert, and while I haven't hesitated to include Stelvin wines on any of my lists, I'm still waiting for that sea change to grab hold of an industry that, alas, has only made one statutory change in the Bordeaux classification system in one hundred and fifty years. I won't hold my breath.