Why Switch to Neocork?
(one customer’s reason in his own words)

For more than fifteen years I have personally been looking for a better
mousetrap (wine closure). I have investigated dozens of alternative
closures. I have bottled tens of thousands of experimental wines to test the
short- and long-term effects of various closures on wine as it ages over
months and years. I have worked very closely with most of the product
development people in the synthetic cork industry. After more than ten years
of study, I am convinced that the synthetic corks we are currently using represent
a vastly superior closure for most (but not all) consumers, and for most (but not all) wines.

In a very recent competitive tasting of a wide variety of California
regions, wineries, price points and varieties, one of the judges
privately provided me with the following statistics:

* 2,247 wines were judged by various panels of 4 experienced judges/panel
* 88 bottles (3.9%) were rejected and resampled due to identified cork defects.
* Unfortunately, in my experience, this level of cork defects is very typical of
what we can routinely expect to see from bark corks.

On our bottling lines, we produce more than 200 bottles every minute.
With bark corks, this level of defect translates to nearly 8 defective
bottles every minute, thousands every day on that line. If you suspect,
as I do, that most consumers who get a bad bottle of wine will select a
different brand the next time, I think you start to understand what
drove me to look for a wine closure that would produce much smaller
numbers of dissatisfied customers. I don't think many businesses can
afford to produce 8 dissatisfied customers a minute for very long.
I suspect wineries have survived bark cork up to now simply because
it was a net-zero game: for every customer a winery lost due to cork taint,
they replaced him or her with another one from a competitor for the same reason.

It stands to reason that, if customers can consistently get a good
bottle of wine for a good price the first time and every time they try
our products, we will have a strong competitive advantage over
competitors who knowingly keep producing thousands of defective
bottles every day.

That is why we made the change.