The greatest enemy of wine is oxygen. It rots the drink, in short order and without fail. All those who make or drink wine have known this for millennia and have sought various ways to impede or prevent the oxidation of wine. They floated a layer of olive oil over their wine. Or sealed it in animal skins or clay amphorae, the openings of the latter closed against the air with wooden discs wrapped in pitch-soaked cloth or rung round with wax.

Then someone found cork, an ingenuity of nature unlike any other. Cork is formed of millions of multi-sided cells, each impermeable by either liquid or gas. After compression, these cells recover 85 percent of their initial volume immediately and 100 percent within 24 hours.

In the late 1600s, due primarily to advances in glass blowing that allowed for thin but durable and uniform bottle necks, the bark of the cork oak, quercus suber — peeled, washed, cured, bleached and punched out as cylinders — became the ultimate bottle-stopper. Nothing could beat it.

But beginning in the late 1980s, wine tasters and critics began to notice that something was not right with a percentage of wines closed in bottles by cork. The offense was a chemical called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, or TCA, produced by microbes living in the small pores that run throughout cork bark.

TCA causes the wines that it taints to smell and taste musty or moldy, as in a dank, mildewy basement. It also mutes wine’s aromas and flavors by half or more. When affected by TCA, a wine is said to be “corked.” TCA is harmless but potent; it’s perceptible at as low as 4 to 6 parts per trillion (equal to one second of time in 64 centuries).

Since the onset of cork taint, of all the substitutes for cork (crown caps, for example, or synthetic extruded “corks”) none is equally as ballyhooed — or as scorned — as the screwcap. Partisans from winemaking countries such as New Zealand use little else. Wine drinkers as different as North Americans and the French recoil from it.

One person I know says that “every wine” (of many) that she has opened from under screwcap “tastes like vinegar.” It’s impossible that every wine she’s opened is vinegared, but that’s the most extreme I’ve heard of a bias of the mind causing a taste of the tongue.

“We have so romanticized the cork,” says Martin Krajewski, owner of Chateau de Sours in Bordeaux who bottles some, though not all, his wines under screwcap. “Anything put up to compare to it fails.”

For my part, I am tired of the prejudiced resistance to screwcap. I’ve spoken with dozens of winemakers and winery owners who consider the screwcap a miracle (of course they’re partial, but they are also closest to the truth). As Peter Fraser, winemaker at Australia’s Yangarra Estate Vineyard, puts it, “What I like is that I know the buyer is going to get out of the bottle exactly what I put into it.”

I’ve spoken with many consumers who are very comfortable with it. And I (and many of my students) have tasted dozens of wines, young and old, that are just fine under screwcap. Sure, I have found “off” aromas or flawed wines, or merely “meh” wines, under screwcap — but in the same measure that I have found such wines in bottles that have been closed by cork.

After our son, Colin, was born in 1983, his mother and I bought a case of 1983 Chateau Margaux, the pearl from Bordeaux for the vintage, delivered in 1985. We opened these cork-finished bottles over 19 years, to mark his graduations and birthdays, ending on his 21st.

The last bottle was not the best, the most developed, the crown of the case. The wine’s aging quality was all over the place, all of those 19 years. There is a saying: “No good years, only good bottles.”

Seth Allen is owner of Simple Farmer Wines, a Chicago-based importer of wines bottled under both cork and screwcap. He has had long experience with screwcap (as well as with a glass and plastic stopper called Vinolok).

Using the brand name of the most well-known screwcap, Stelvin (like calling any tissue “Kleenex”), he says that “If I want a reliable outcome, I always go for Stelvin. I’ve tasted dozens of wines that are going on 10 to 12 years, largely white wines from cool climates with high acidity — they age well — and I’ve not seen any deterioration. They are the exact same wines all along.”

He draws an analogy between wine and music, a helpful one that highlights the variability of aging wine under cork. “It’s like a 60 year-old recording of Toscanini,” Allen says. “Someone tells you that ‘You just have to listen to the music underneath all the scratches and the dirt.’ Well, wouldn’t the music just be better anyway without all that scratching?”

Bill St. John has been writing and teaching about wine for more than 40 years. He is a former food editor of The Denver Post and now lives in Chicago. E-mail him at bsjtrib@gmail.com.

Screwcap recommendations

These are some random recommendations from more than 70 different wines sampled for a column on wines closed with screwcap. White wines first, then reds, listed by increasing price.

2011 Gouguenheim Torrontes Valle Escondido Tupungato Argentina: Wide-open and generous aromas of orange blossom and white spice; take an everyday vinho verde and max everything except the gas. $10

2012 Artadi Artazu Garnacha Rosado “Artazuri” Navarra Spain: Perfect candidate for screwcap because you’ll want it at its freshest, all that cranberry and strawberry in aroma and flavor; lean, zesty, refreshing. $10

2010 Maculan White Blend “Pino & Tai” Veneto Italy: A blend of three northern Italian white grapes; crisp, apple-like, fresh and clean. $12-$15

2011 Mulderbosch Sauvignon Blanc Western Cape South Africa: A never-fail sauvignon for its delicious green fruit aromas and flavors; zingy acidity cleans up after most anything the kitchen slings. $12-$16

2011 Saint Clair Family Sauvignon Blanc “Wairau Reserve” Marlborough New Zealand: All the litchi fruit, rosewater, grapefruit and (for those who understand British English), nettles and gooseberries you’d ever want from a Kiwi sauvignon, in depth and wrapped in velvet. $30

2012 Andrew Murray White Blend “RGB Camp 4 Vineyard” Santa Ynez California: Half grenache blanc, half roussanne, fermented together for seamless, fat and chin-dripping juicy Rhone-style white from a favorite all-screwcap producer from our country; buy in confidence anything that this fellow makes. $25

2010 Matetic Vineyards Pinot Noir “Coralillo” San Antonio Chile: Perfect pinot: gorgeous, limpid red-purple color, linear focus to its dark cherry scents and savors, with wispy tannin and tangy acidity; deliciously juicy on finish. $28

John Duval White Blend “Plexus” Barossa Valley Australia: Another Rhone-style white blend, this time from southern Australia where these things rule; mostly the difficult Marsanne for a nice edge to the richly textured apricot and peach fruit. $31

2010 Moorooduc Estate Chardonnay Mornington Peninsula Victoria Australia: The equal of a $50 village-level white Burgundy in all aspects; gorgeous aromas and silken texture just crying for the table. $32

2011 Weingut Heinrich Red Blend Neusiedlersee Austria: Characterful blend of the three top Austrian red grapes; zesty, juicy, smooth and quite inviting; moderately tannic, could take a chill; flexible for many dishes except light fish or fowl. $16

2012 Nobilo Pinot Noir “Icon” Marlborough New Zealand: In the ‘smoky, brooding” family of pinot noirs, although not clumsy or heavy-handed; difficult to find any wines from New Zealand without screwcap and this is a longtime standard bearer of the better rung. $17-$22

2010 Robert Oatley Shiraz “Signature” McLaren Vale South Australia: As black as Bo Obama’s nose; dark red fruit aromas and flavors follow to a gulpable smooth texture with can’t-see-’em tannins; great buy in Aussie shiraz. $20

2010 Yangarra Estate Shiraz McLaren Vale Australia: So much prettiness and power at once for so little money; gorgeous ripe fruit, teasingly soft texture, haunting persistence of flavor; perfect Aussie shiraz. $21

2011 Plumpjack Winery Chardonnay “Reserve” Napa Valley California: Stuck its neck out long before any others from prestige level in Napa to bottle under screwcap; this is fine chardonnay, luxurious without cloying, nuanced without being shy; the closure is a benefit if you age it. $50

2010 Cade Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Howell Mountain Napa Valley California: A rare example of expensive cabernet under screwcap, but both noteworthy for its chutzpah and notable for its extremely high quality; dark, brooding fruit, ample tannins and a never-ending finish is superb mountain cabernet from America’s best place for it. $150

2010 Two Hands Wines “Twelftree” Gomersal Single Vineyard Grenache Barossa Valley Australia: You will have a difficult time pulling this wine from your nose because the aromas are just a bit too inviting and seductive; once you do though, the tongue is in for a treat of juicy, “sweet” grenache from very old vines and at the hand of a master winemaker. Screwcap at this price? As they say there, “Good on ya.” $65-$75