Nuts and Bolts. Nuts and Bolts.

Mad Ants down by 1 with the ball and 1:30 left in the game. Rob Kurz drives the lane and gets hammered. No call. Sean Sonderleiter reaches in on the rebound and is whistled for a foul. In frustration, Rob protests the call emphatically, but in no way challenges the referee directly. Oversensitive referee calls a technical foul. Reno hits the technical free throw, then hits the two free throws from Sonderleiter's foul to go up 4. Momentum is lost and so is the game: Reno 94, Mad Ants 90. It has not been often in the past three years that referees' calls have directly cost us games, but this one was egregious in the extreme.

As frustrating as the call was, there is no better time for me to get a bit more in-depth about SCREW caps. When I last mentioned screw caps, I was discussing how some new world wineries are breaking away from the centuries-old practice of stopping wine bottles with cork by using alternative closures, such as screw caps or synthetic corks. This break from tradition is necessary because corks have a 5-10% failure rate, resulting in lost profits for wineries and higher prices for consumers (to offset those lost profits).

New world wineries, especially those in Australia and New Zealand, have been at the forefront of these changes for several years now because their cork failure rates are on average higher than any other wine-growing region in the world. This high failure rate is not a simple case of bad luck. Wine corks are made from cork trees grown primarily in Portugal and Sardinia, Italy, meaning that European wineries have the first opportunity to choose the best corks. American wineries then get to choose, followed by South African and South American wineries and finally Australian and New Zealand wineries. There are exceptions to this order where individual wineries have negotiated contracts with cork producers, but by and large Australia and NZ wineries get the short end of the stick. Having last pick at cork each year means that these wineries have failure rates hovering at 10% and above.

To overcome this disadvantage, winemakers in Australia began experimenting with screw caps well over ten years ago. While they found that screw caps greatly reduced their wines' failure rates, they ran into a whole new problem: wine consumers have for decades associated screw caps with cheap wines such as Boone's Farm and Thunderbird. Furthermore, they discovered that many consumers considered the romance of pulling a cork out of a bottle to be essential to enjoying a bottle of wine.

While these challenges have been daunting, they have not been insurmountable. The use of screw caps has spread across the New World and is now even discovering limited acceptance by some European wineries. Consumers are also beginning to embrace this new technology, as the confidence of knowing a bottle will not be tainted is beginning to outweigh the romance of using a corkscrew.

Still, there remains much distance to travel before screw tops are widely accepted, and there is still a very large question as to how wines age when under screw. Corks allow for a minute amount of air transfer as a wine ages, contributing to a wine "maturing." Screw caps, however, do not allow any air to pass into the wine, theoretically limiting the amount of maturing that can occur. Still, there has not been enough research done into this question to deliver a firm answer and many wineries appear willing to accept that risk.

I also mentioned another alternative closure - synthetic cork. A short while ago, before screw caps became all the rage, it appeared that synthetic cork would emerge as the alternative closure of choice for wineries. It was thought to have none of cork's failure issues, while still maintaining the romance of popping a cork. As time has passed, however, synthetic cork has proven to be more susceptible to wine taint than previously thought and consumers have been averse to plastic in their wine bottles.

With synthetic corks on the way out, and with more wineries adopting screw caps in lieu of natural cork every year, it appears that wine consumers will have no choice but to discard their prejudices against screw caps and learn to love twisting a bottle open instead of uncorking it.

As for me, I am going to get over my griping against the officiating and unscrew the cap on a bottle of appropriately named Bitch wine, a grenache from Australia.