To Cork or Not To Cork by George M. Taber

When we visited Paumanok and got a chance to meet and speak with second generation winemaker, Kareem Massoud, he mentioned that a good read was the book To Cork or Not To Cork by George M. Taber. I've read another book written by George Taber called Judgement of Paris, which I really enjoyed so we bought this book to learn all about corks and other wine closures.
Why dedicate an entire book to cork? During the UC Davis online course, we had a discussion forum devoted to cork and other closures. Had I read this book, I would have been more informed on the controversy. Although cork as a closure for wine has been around since the ancient Roman era and industrial cork was made in Anguine, Spain in 1750, the controversy surrounding cork as a closure came to prominence in the 1980's with a seeming epidemic of cork tainted wines.
The French were experimenting with a screw cap closure called Stelcap-vin, later shortened to Stelvin in the 1960's. Australian winemakers were also looking for alternatives because they were experiencing major cork failures leading some to feel that they were the dumping ground for poorer quality corks.
In 1981, Hans Tanner and his colleague Carla Zanier, using GC-MS (gas chromatography-mass spectrometry) identified the offending compound of cork taint to be 2,4,6-trichloroanisole or TCA. Their work was published in the Swiss Review of Fruit and Wine written in German and English, French and Italian abstracts of the study were also published.
Not all the problems of cork taint arose from cork. During the 1980's France was faced with a problem that affected their entire inventories of wines. Pierre Chatonnet traced the problem to chlorine-based pentachlorophenol, one of the compounds in wood preservatives used around wineries. Pentachlorophenol can become pentachloroanisole, a compound similar to TCA in it's structure.
Taber also gives detailed accounts of alternative closures such as SupremeCorq and Neocork as well as technical cork products such as Altec. One chapter is about the Austrlian experiment designed to test 14 different closures using Semillon, a light, white wine.
It is a comprehensively researched, yet approachable book on cork and alternative closures. An all you wanted to know but were afraid to ask book which George Taber peppers with vignettes called Message in a Bottle, which I found to be very interesting.