Yesterday, while Sue was tasting the wines at the First Glass Wine Options competition and trying to answer the questions about whether it was a Shiraz, a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Pinot Noir (etc), I was out in the back room doing the quality control.
For the 8 main competition wines we opened 17 bottles of each wine for the 54 4-person teams. There were 4 'bonus' wines that were for only one member of each team, and we opened 6 bottles of these. So that made 160 bottles in total. I had personally decided a couple of years back that I would taste every bottle regardless of it being under screwcap or not.
Of the 160 wines, only one bottle of Morton Estate Coniglio Chardonnay 2002 was corked. A few of the cork closed wines showed some bottle variation, but all of the screwcap closed wines were pristine.
So what does that say about cork and/or screwcap? Not a lot. But it was not an easy task tasting 160 samples of wine in 3 hours, but someone had to do it.