Aluminum screw caps once sealed primarily cheap malt liquors and quart bottles of beer; today they cap 20 percent of the world’s table wines.

While screw caps offer a lower cost alternative to natural corks, which can cost more than $1 each for the top-quality grade, that’s not the reason wine producers chose them.

Its ability to be stored upright is one of the many advantages of the screw-cap bottle. Screw-caps have improved over the 45 or so years that they’ve been used on wine.

So in the end, going for the screw-cap style wine bottle might be the safest way to go. Unless you'll terribly miss the pop of a cork coming unstopped. Read next ...

It was a small news story; the end of a decade-long experiment into the screw-cap closure for André Lurton Pessac Léognans whites. But it came just weeks after I had done a horizontal tasting of ...