Research

CURRENT RESEARCH

VinPerfect has spent over $1 million in research and development to create and commercialize the patent-pending SmartCap™. This section describes what guided us and how we approached this research.

Establishing a Practical Oxygen Transmission Rate ("OTR")

We believe that if a closure can manage the oxygen transmission rate, winemakers can control when the wine's quality peaks in the bottle. In order to achieve this goal, it was necessary to find a balance between two competing oxygen-driven dynamics. On the one hand, winemakers want some post-bottling oxygen to avoid reduction. On the other hand, too much oxygen can cause the wine to become aldehydic (smelling oxidized).

Our efforts were focused on providing oxygen levels which allow the winemaker to optimize each wine's shelf life. The SmartCap™ helps the winemaker present a wine in its most open and expressive state.

Save the Environment One Bottle at a Time - VinPerfect is the Green Choice

Find out why VinPerfect screwcaps are an environmentally responsible choice for your wine closure here.

Our Approach

VinPerfect combined established science, proprietary research, and our winemaking experience with some common sense to develop parameters for our SmartCaps' oxygen transmission rate.

The impact of free SO2 on a wine's quality is the critical factor in determining the OTR of the SmartCap™. Wines with levels of free SO2 below 10 ppm are in danger of becoming aldehydic, making these wines "dead". It was our goal to develop liners that would stay above this threshold for a certain number of years – based on the expected life of each varietal.

Studies of model wines show that 1 ppm O2 can cause a drop of as much as 4 ppm SO2. Therefore, a wine bottled with the industry norm of post-bottling SO2 at 30 ppm would require 5 ppm O2 to drop below 10 ppm SO2. Based on these dynamics, our metric for closure performance is the number of years it takes the bottle to reach 5 ppm of O2 and the related level of 10 ppm of free SO2. The SmartCap™ is offered in three different oxygen transmission rates, designed for shelf lives consistent with certain varietals:

• Light –