Picture the scene. You’ve gathered your closest friends and family for a celebratory dinner. You’ve carefully planned the food and splashed out on an expensive bottle of wine. All eyes are on you as you pull the cork with a satisfying pop, you raise it to your lips and…it smells like mouldy socks.

Corked. The mere mention of the word is enough to bring a grimace to any wine lover’s lips. It is also a term that is much misunderstood and misused, certainly contentious, and part of a wider and very heated debate about closures that is currently gripping the wine world.

Though it may appear at first sight to be a minor matter – something of a storm in a wine cup – it has the potential to change the way we buy, drink and even make wine in the future. To highlight the significance of the issue, one wine producer has even suggested, only half in jest, that the choice of closure has more significance for a wine’s flavour than the terroir in which the grapes are grown. And that choice of closure, it seems, is less and less about cork with every day that passes.

To begin with, it’s worth recapping on some of the key issues in the great closure debate. For hundreds of years, cork was the best, indeed virtually only closure available for bottled wine. Its chief benefit is the way it can be stretched and compressed to fit into a bottle neck while providing a watertight seal for the wine inside. It also allows a certain amount of air into the bottle, which means the wine can “breathe” and thus develop and mature.

It was, in short, a natural solution for a nascent wine industry.

However, with the passing of time it has become clear that the case for cork as the ultimate wine seal is far from closed. Chief among these detractions is the fact that cork is inherently unreliable. Some corks have natural flaws which allow too much air to get into the bottle, causing the wine to oxidise and spoil.

Moreover, in some cases the cork passes on a chemical taint (TCA) produced by microbes living inside the bark. In severely tainted wine, this compound gives rise to pungent musty smells, while in smaller concentrations it merely flattens the wine’s aromas and flavours, making for a dull wine experience.

(As a brief aside, it is this TCA infection which is what is meant by a wine being “corked”. However, it should be noted that TCA taint can come from sources other than cork. In addition, the term “corked” is often used, perhaps unadvisedly, to refer to a host of other wine imperfections. The one thing a corked wine is not is a wine that has bits of cork floating in it.)

Reputable surveys have estimated the incidence of cork taint to be around the 4-5 per cent mark or higher, so at least one in 20 bottles. As wine consumption has grown and drinkers become more aware of the problems associated with cork, many producers and retailers have sought out alternative closures. It is the development of such viable alternatives to cork and, after some initial resistance by producers and consumers alike, their popular uptake, which has changed the debate entirely.

Synthetic (or plastic) corks are one option, though they can be difficult to extract and are often not ideal for long-term storage. So-called technical corks, for which the cork is modified and treated prior to use in order to remove taint and variable quality issues, are already proving popular in some quarters. Glass stoppers and even crown caps for sparkling wine are also starting to appear, again with positive initial results.

The real pretender to cork’s throne, however, is screwcap. The advantages are plain: screwcap provides a more reliable seal than cork, free of TCA taint, and it is also easy to open and re-seal. The use of screwcaps for quality wine has boomed over the last decade as high-profile wine producers and retailers have enthusiastically endorsed their use.

Then again, screwcap’s disadvantages are also undeniable. Consumer surveys indicate that people tend to associate them with cheap wine and prefer the comforting traditional appeal of cork. What is more, certain teething problems involved in switching technologies have given rise to variable quality, and there are also certain worries over how wines will age and develop long term, for which little data exist. As a result, most wineries have tended to limit the wines they are marketing under screwcap to early-drinking, fresh styles of white and rosé.

More recently, a report has shown that screwcaps have a carbon footprint some four times worse than that of natural corks. So should environmental concerns also be a factor in the choice of wine closure?

For the moment, it seems that there are no definitive answers in the great closure debate. Many alternatives are vying for precedence, with powerful commercial interests at stake, and as a result this is an exciting period of change and improvement for world wine. Whatever the outcome, the one result every wine drinker will be happy with is if fewer wines smell like mouldy socks.