Closures

closures. for wine containers are necessary to avoid harmful contact with oxygen and changed remarkably little until recent times. corks are still the principal closures used for wine bottles, just as they were more than two centuries ago and probably long before that, although alternative stoppers have become increasingly common since the mid 1980s, thanks primarily to a rise in the incidence of cork taint.

1. Goode, J. A., Wine Science: The Application of Science in Winemaking (2nd edn, London, 2014).