My Round: Here's a corking idea! Buy wines that have screw-top lids - even if you're spending serious money

Summer is a slow season for wine tastings. I have attended only two tastings in recent weeks, both small affairs. In the first I went through around 25 wines, of which two were corked. In the second, there were 39 wines; two of those were corked. I mention these corky encounters because the Wine and Spirits Association has recently come out with what some will regard as definitive figures on the incidence of corked wine. While the results have been widely reported, including in this newspaper, it's well worth thoroughly traipsing over the territory.

After testing 13,780 bottles over 18 months, the WSA arrived at a figure of around 1 per cent, with a total of 3.4 per cent affected by some kind of "commercially significant" fault. The technical definition of commercially significant, by the way, is: "Perceptible by any idiot, unless he's drunk enough to make him sing along to 'I Will Always Love You' at the top of his voice."

The WSA's numbers roll in at a lower level than most other figures – and a lot lower than my experience suggests (I have been to tastings where cork-catastrophe struck a quarter or more of the bottles). Is the WSA trying to paint a rosier figure than the reality deserves? No. But before its figures are accepted as gospel, its methods need a little questioning. Its research began with the wine companies, whose own experts were asked to send dubious bottles to a panel appointed by the study's sponsors; they then passed the bottles to yet another group, this time of independent assessors from two outside agencies.

In other words, the bottles had been open for several days before the "official" verdict was given. You know yourself that keeping wine open changes the way it tastes and smells. It is possible – indeed likely – that what the final panel tasted was appreciably different from what the first tasters tasted. Had corked wine oxidised between first sip and last, so that the official verdict was of oxidation rather than the mouldy funk of corkiness? Hard to tell. That's why I, for one, will be taking those findings with a pinch of smelling salts.

And why I'll be applauding more energetically than ever the efforts of people who try to get wine bottles sealed with screwcaps rather than pieces of bark. Even by the WSA's very conservative estimates at least a million or so corked bottles are sold here every year. Tesco, aiming to cut that figure, launched a major screwcap push in the spring. It used the peerless closures on 30 wines, both branded bottles from Australia and own-label wines, right up to the £8.99 mark. A success? You bet. In 10 weeks it sold 1.5 million screwcapped bottles, and it's expanding the programme into more wines from Europe. This is good news.

Or mostly good news. In-store research found that while 65 per cent of punters would buy a screwcapped bottle, the primary reasons for doing so had to do with ease of use, not fear of cork-taint. In other words, those customers are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. But that's better than doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. Watch this space.

If you're looking for something cork-free, and you want a change of pace from the usual summer round of Muscadet and pink wine, here's an out-of-left-field tip. Duché de Longueville has been quietly selling its single-varietal Normandy ciders for some time now, and came out with a new one for summer. Called Gros Oeillet, it is fermented to complete dryness but has rich, punchy flavours which leave most cider looking green with envy. Tesco and Sainsbury's sell it for £1.49 for 500ml. It is one of the few ciders this column would drink happily. And it's never been anywhere near a cork. *