Corks Versus Screw Caps – UC Davis Researches Flavor Differences

Whether you side with “Team-Cork” or “Team-Cap,” the results of this UC Davis Study should be interesting.  The test features wine only so far, but I suspect the results will apply to beer.  This from UC Davis:

Our goal in this study is to determine if individual bottles might be getting a lot more or less oxygen — and therefore aging at different rates — as a result of the variation in the closures used to seal the bottle,” said Waterhouse, who is carrying out the study with UC Davis undergraduate student Jillian Guernsey.

The researchers have included a novel step in this study, using medical imaging technology to obtain a baseline evaluation of each of the corks. To do this, they teamed up with John Boone, a radiology professor in the UC Davis School of Medicine and an internationally known expert in designing and improving computed tomography scans for breast imaging. Boone, who also leads the cancer imaging research initiative for the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, used a new CT scanner, which he had invented, to obtain images of each of the 200 natural and synthetic corks.
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