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Why Some Bottles Taste Like Wet Cardboard (And Ours Won’t)
Why Every SAMsARA Bottle Is Sealed With Purpose (Not Just a Cork)
There’s a small ritual to opening a bottle of wine: foil, corkscrew, cork. For us, what happens before that moment matters just as much.
We’ve talked before about our commitment to quality and transparency, from the vineyards we source from to the low intervention winemaking practices we follow. But there’s a detail we don’t get asked about much, the cork itself. It’s a small thing that turns out to say a lot.
A Problem Most Wine Lovers Have Run Into
Here’s something you’ve probably experienced without realizing why: opening two bottles of the exact same wine, same vintage, and finding they taste noticeably different. Or, worse, catching that musty, wet cardboard smell wine people call “corked.”
Traditional natural cork, for all its romance, has a quirk. Each one is genuinely unique, which sounds poetic until you realize it means each one transfers oxygen slightly differently. Some bottles age exactly as intended. Others don’t.
Why We Use Diam
Diam corks start as natural cork, then get cleaned at the molecular level to remove TCA (the compound behind cork taint) and reformed so every single closure performs identically.
It’s natural cork, minus the unpredictability.
In over 20 years and more than 20 billion bottles closed, Diam has never had a reported case of detectable cork taint above their guaranteed threshold. What sold us, though, was something else: complete bottle to bottle consistency. Every bottle in a case ages the same way, because the oxygen transfer rate is identical from cork to cork, which is about as close as you can get to a guarantee on how a wine will develop over time.
A Few Small Details, If You’re Curious
Our Diam 10 closures hold their integrity and oxygen transfer for 10 years at normal storage temperatures, or up to 20 if kept cooler. And unlike a natural cork, storage position doesn’t matter, upright, on its side, doesn’t make a difference with these.
They’re also 100% recyclable and EcoVadis Gold rated, one of the highest sustainability standards in the EU.
What a Cork Actually Tells You
Something worth knowing next time you’re looking at a bottle: the closure a winemaker chooses says something about their intentions for that wine. A screw cap or a visibly porous cork usually signals a wine meant to be opened young. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just a different approach.
A Diam cork tends to signal the opposite, a wine built with aging in mind. We chose it because we craft our wines to last, not just to be opened next week.
We’re in Good Company
A majority of Chablis producers have made the switch to Diam. So have most white Grand Cru Burgundy estates, and a meaningful share of Champagne houses. When some of the most exacting winemakers in the world land on the same choice, it’s worth noticing.
Why We’re Sharing This
Because the wine you’re cellaring, pouring for someone, or bringing to dinner should be exactly what we meant it to be, every time. That consistency starts with a decision most people never think to ask about.
If you want to go deeper, Diam’s CEO Dominique Tornare sat down with wine podcast host Levi Dalton to talk through all of this on I’ll Drink to That.
