The traditional wine closure cork is making a comeback, which will strike fear into the heart of anyone who has struggled with a corkscrew.
A new generation of winemakers is going old school, despite the fact that screw caps have dominated the Australian wine industry for decades.
Noah Ward is a brand ambassador at Unico Zelo, which produces wines in South Australia's Adelaide Hills.
He said that making wine more sustainable was behind the push to put corks back into bottles.
There is a little plastic polymer that won't biodegrade very well, which is not necessarily good for the planet. Corks have also helped wines develop more naturally, according to Ward, in addition to its environmental benefits.
Our business started in the 2010s, which was a major shift in the wine industry with the emergence of natural wine or lo-fi wine, minimal intervention, wine. Most of the producers of that ilk used corks or other products like that, he said.
Screw caps can do a lot better than corks, they can keep wine protected from oxygen for a long period of time, so they can age a lot longer.
I like to see wine develop quicker, so I can drink it sooner rather than wait 25 years for my semillon to get to that point where it is not very high in acid. General manager Dan Simmons of Australian cork manufacturer Vinocor said the change came about because of a chemical called trichloroanisole or TCA.
He said the term is 'corked'.
TCA can make the wine smell like wet cardboard - it basically ruins the wine.
In the nineties, around 5 per cent of wines were tainted by this chemical compound. In response to this, Mr Simmons said Australian wine producers started shifting to screw caps in the early 2000s.
He said that the cork industry went from providing nearly all of the market to a position where probably only 10 per cent of the market was filled with cork.
In 2004 Diam, the French parent company of Vinocor, created a solution.
They took some technology that was used by the coffee industry to remove caffeine from coffee beans and adapted that to the cork industry to remove TCA and other flavour-modifying molecules, Mr Simmons said.
It solved the other problem of bottle variation because the Diam cork is actually granulated cork and then is put back together. They're very consistent as it removed the problem of random oxidisation. The local industry had moved on.
More companies needed to use it to make recycling programs worthwhile, because the cork was experiencing a resurgence, making up about 15 per cent of closures of Australian wines.
The secondary uses are immense, he said. Cork is in the soles of shoes, it's in the installation, it's the inside of cricket balls, he said.
According to Simmons, Vinocor hoped to work with competitors to promote the use of corks more widely.
Collecting corks for recycling in America and Europe is normal practice in other markets because they have the critical mass. Once consumers understood the benefits of cork, they were on board, said Ward.
It was a challenge to make sure they had the tools to open wines with this closure.
One of my favourite things in the world is trying to get MacGyver to open a bottle of wine, Mr Ward said.
If you're into wine and you start buying stuff from interesting small producers, you're going to have to spend 10 bucks to buy a corkscrew.