The respective merits of cork versus the screw top can provoke a surprising degree of emotion in the spirits industry. Screw caps for wine bottles have been around since the late 1950s. Resistance meant they were slow to be embraced by winemakers in Europe even while they were found to be at least as good a seal as cork.
Cork denotes quality to many wine drinkers, though the science would have us believe that screw tops are perfectly adequate. Winemakers in Australia and New Zealand embraced screw caps decades before winemakers in Europe.
Today, screw caps are the norm in wine you find in supermarkets and a few adventurous winemakers in the premium market, though the more expensive the bottle of wine, the less likely it is to have a cork.
Screw caps are undoubtedly a more user-friendly approach to wine. Who hasn’t stabbed a corkscrew into a bottle at some stage to split the cork and find little bits of it floating on top of the wine?
While winemakers have been slowly embracing screw tops, whiskey distillers went the other way. Whiskey bottles used to be corked until the Scottish brand Black & White introduced a screw cap in 1926. It immediately doubled sales and other whiskey brands followed.
Screw caps became the norm in the whiskey world. This denotes the different way the alcohol is consumed. A bottle of wine is usually finished in one or two sittings; a bottle of whiskey might be around for months, or even years.
Some winemakers believe cork is best as the porousness of the material allows the wine to breathe, but whiskey has done all its breathing by the time it is bottled.
The debate is one that animates many whiskey drinkers on blogs and websites, but increasingly whiskey distillers are turning to cork as a way of discerning their products.
The latest is Walsh Whiskey the makers of the well-known brand Writers' Tears and The Irishman. Walsh Whiskey was founded by husband and wife Bernard and Rosemary Walsh in 1999, with The Irishman Irish cream liqueur followed by The Irishman whiskey in 2007 and Writers' Tears in 2009.
The name of the latter, as Bernard Walsh states, is a plus for the label with its connotations of literary melancholia aided and abetted by alcohol. “I might call it an emotive brand,” he said
The distinctive Writers’ Tears label is getting a full makeover courtesy of the London brand consultancy, Stranger and Stranger, with the support of Bord Bia’s insight centre.
The bottle has new features and the teardrop has been embossed on the front of the main label. The cork is part of these “subtle embellishments” as Walsh describes them. It is wrapped in a foil seal which must be broken before it can be removed. The foil features the Writers’ Tears logo medallion on the neck of the bottle. The medallion also appears on the surface of the wooden cork stopper.
Walsh says that whiskey has been corked for centuries and that this is a return to the status quo rather than a new departure. “It is not going to take away from the whiskey, it is not going to add to the whiskey. It’s one part of our makeover for Writers’ Tears,” he explains. Besides, he says, the pop on a cork is in itself a form of celebration that cannot be replicated with a screw cap.
The cork is a “premium cue” as he puts it and denotes that Writers’ Tears is a more upmarket product. Writers’ Tears is in the super-premium category which is categorised as whiskey in the range of between $35-$60 (€30-€50), the US being the primary market for such whiskey. It is also available in the ultra-premium category of $100 (€85) and upwards.
Walsh says he was nervous about changing an image which has served the Writers’ Tears brand well, but is making the changes “with one eye to the future”.
After decades of year on year growth consumption of Irish whiskey is expected to decline by 14.1 per cent this year in volume terms. The global Covid-19 pandemic has clobbered sales in bars and restaurants and decimated the duty-free market.
The Irish whiskey industry is hopeful, though, this is an aberration brought about by a once-in-a-century pandemic. “Leaving aside these two things, Irish whiskey is having a strong year. In the off-premise [RETAIL], as the Americans say, we should see double-digit growth,” Walsh says.
