Closing bottles with corks is a time-honored tradition from the 17th century.  The romanticized appeal of such tradition is difficult to overcome for uninformed consumers, and even for those informed few who know how to (and have the ability to) recognize the damaged bottles but who have enough money to spend on the 5% of their wine that turns out to be bad.  More complete information on the defects we're speaking of is included in the articles linked at the bottom of this page.

There are two facts we consider the 'most important' about deciding if screwcaps are preferable to natural corks:

1)  By conservative estimates, 5% of all wine sealed with natural cork is tainted by TCA, causing the wine to smell and taste to varying degrees like a moldy basement or old wet sweat socks.
2)  Special, hard-to-use tools are required to get into and to re-close bottles that don't use screwcaps.

Choosing a wine closure based on aesthetics seems silly to us. 
The point is to enjoy the wine, the food, and your friends & family. 

The cork is not the center of attention nor should it be.  Tainted wine, however, will certainly become the center of attention when it appears in 1 of every 20 bottles, and so will the search for a corkscrew if one isn't available.  The breaking of a cork is a frustration, too, when a practiced person isn't at the helm of the special tools needed.  The older we get, the more difficult it becomes to get into the wines we enjoy.  How silly, we believe, to put so much importance on the "pop" we hear for 1/10th of 1 second, rather than on the quality of the wine we're serving and the ease of getting to it.

We haven't even mentioned yet the significant money wasted on tainted wine, and the marketing disaster that is trying to sell customers on a product that 5% of the time is experienced by first-time consumers as tasting like moldy sweat socks.  I know of nobody that would accept that same defect rate in a 60 cent can of beans...so why do we readily accept it in $6 to $66 bottle of wine?!?

There have been studies.  There has been wine sealed in screwcaps for decades and there have been varying technologies applied to cork to clean up the TCA.  Scholars will argue almost perfectly on both sides while disagreeing about whether wine ages well with one of these two styles of closure.  Meanwhile, drinkers regularly consume 95% of their wine in the same month or two that it is purchased.  To our thought, if it is so difficult for either side to prove whether or not wine ages well (after at least 20 years of testing) it must not be enough of a difference to worry about for any wine not planning to be cellared more than 20 years (which is 99.9% of all wines). 

And for that 0.1% of wines to be cellared for a long period of time, it's going to cost significant money.  It's probably some of the world's best wine.  Whatever the tests indicate about whether or not the wine ages properly, just be prepared to dump 1 in 20 of your naturally-corked bottles down the drain when opened.  For wines you must experience, it will be necessary to cellar several bottles of any one wine.  It's an expensive way to invest in wine but necessary as long as there are still two sides to the story.

Click here for another article About Natural Cork vs. Other Closures.  This article is very complete, but seems to consider the aesthetic appeal of natural cork to be the #1 consideration for determining the "proper" closure.  We here at Salut! disagree with the eventual conclusion of this article, and encourage our customers to dispense with the romanticized view of this defective, old and difficult natural closure.

Here is an article About Screwcaps in a more matter-of-fact opinion closer to the opinion of Salut! Wine Co., from the website of a New Zealand winery.