Does a bear sip in the woods? One of the most annoying buzz words of the modern era must surely be ‘closure’. Apparently that’s what were all looking for in the end. Same with bears. Remember the expression involving bears and the woods and their activities therein? Well, if you thought that was vulgar, it ain’t nothin’ compared to some other things bears do. Recently I read that they plug their bear bottoms with clay before hibernating in order to stop ants and other nasty crawly things doing just that. You’d wake up too with an army of ants forming a rear guard action wouldn’t you? Thus bear bum plugs are not unlike wine corks - both are designed to keep the contents pure and unspoiled until the time arrives to disgorge those contents. (S’cuse the imagery). Sure, bears don’t have to keep their contents for years to mature and they haven’t got easy access to alternatives such as screw caps (although crown seals might be an option for polar bears), but you don’t see them using plastic plugs do you? The point is, nature knows best. Better still, next time the editor sends my column back covered in corrections, I am going to tell him/her, “you know what you can do with that red texta? Go hibernate”. I have a foot in both camps when it comes to alternative closures to cork for wine. Not the least because I wouldn’t want to derail the gravy train, but equally for scientific and environmental reasons. Screw caps seem to provide a perfect seal for decades and yet still let the wine mature, albeit slower than under cork, but science is all about saying things are fantastic, until proved otherwise. Who knows, perhaps the highly publicised health benefits of red wine are actually the result of interaction with cork, and there’s bound to be a carcinogen in those synthetics somewhere. Making plastic doesn’t do much for greenhouse gases either, let alone the aesthetics of a cork grove compared to a factory. At least both are recyclable. A mob called ProCork also have a foot in each camp. They use natural cork sealed at both ends with a synthetic membrane. Da na, best of both worlds. One winery in particular has stuck its bottleneck out and sealed all their wines under the hybrid stopper, Pyrenees producer Mount Avoca. Whoops, while the jury was out, I drank the evidence Your Honour. Here’s my testimony. Mt Avoca 2000 Cabernet Sauvignon, $20. It was cold enough to have a realwinter warmer type of red, but hell, if that meant spending another $20 Iwas willing to put up with this slightly less warming but no lessflavoursome thingy from the crazy cork crew. 8.4/10. Mount Avoca 2000 Merlot, $20. $20 is such a sensible price for wine isn’t it? Makes you feel you’ve spent enough to get a decent one, yet not overdone it. Sometimes you even get more than you bargained for. This was a full 0.5 points better the next day, despite stupidly recorking it with a regular cork instead of the original ProCork. Talk about confusing the issue. 8.5/10.