Obsessed with European tradition it can copy, if not simply purchase, the fledgling Chinese wine industry still loves the romance of cork. Exporters of Australian wines must step backwards to enter China: wines sold safely under screwcaps in the rest of the world are not acceptable to the Chinese unless they’re corked. Which is temporary, given China’s incredible advancements in the packaging of other foods and beverages.

China grows more wine grapes than Australia. If it finds the water to replace our evaporating Chateau Murray-Darling, China will soon be selling cheap wine to Australia. It will then learn the advantages of screw caps, because we won’t want cork unless it’s in platform shoes.

Our heroic Coles is teaching this lesson to the Old World, by purchasing larger volumes of wine provided it’s under screw. The best value sangiovese available here is Vintage Cellars’ “Chalk Board” $15 chianti – the first wine from that huge region to be screwcapped. To reward the producer’s investment in the bottling technology, the opening order was 2000 dozen. Similarly, the first Rioja screwcaps are on the water. This is just the beginning.

Amorim did a sweaty deal with China, through its biggest winery, Great Wall, to ensure all wine served at the Olympics was sealed with “natural cork”. Swarming, no doubt, with all manner of completely natural greeblies, cork being the spongiform bark of the oak, Quercus suber, which structurally resembles a multi-storey five-star hotel for microscopic vermin. Unless, of course, the cork is chlorinebleached, which converts some of those tiny varmints to the dreaded cat-piss/rat’s nest cork taint appropriately called trichloranisole. Amorim consistently claims to have put an end to this infection, but none of the corked wines and whiskies I taste swab clean.

Amorim claims cork is an environmental triumph, preaching on TV ads and the internet that screwcaps threaten the Arcadian bliss of the cork groves of the western Mediterranean, and the serene, pristine peasants who tend them. Not to mention the sacred habitat of the blessed lesser spotted cork dotterel and the freckled pigmy plug sloth.

“One of the world’s greatest examples of sustainable development”, Amorim calls the cork racket. “Wine producers looking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions can address these aspects as a matter of priority”. So screw caps trigger farting? Pull the other one. Given Portugal’s history of specialisation in such delicacies as conquering and colonisation, one may wonder whether Amorim envies China’s attitude to human rights and censorship.

The beer industry used the Olympics to stage a collision of the great tectonic plates of suds. Anheuser-Busch is America’s biggest brewer. It makes 48.5 per cent of US beer, and owns Budweiser, the world’s biggest-selling beer. Not to mention 50 per cent of Grupo Modelo, Mexico’s biggest brewer (with Corona, number five globally), and 27 per cent of Tsingtao, China’s biggest. Budweiser was a major Olympics sponsor. Like Chinese beer, Bud’s made from rice as much as barley, so it’s lighter and simpler and suited to markets that accept only corked wines or beer you can’t drink without jamming a chunk of lemon down its neck.

On a greenbucks clutch equal to Amorim’s, Budweiser boasts of being the world’s largest recycler of aluminium cans. It’s like Banrock Station saving the Murray. I’m green, therefore I deserve. InBev, the Belgian brewer which set up shop in 1366, is the biggest global brewer, with over

200 brands, like Stella Artois, Beck’s, Leffe, Hoegaarden, Skol, Quilmes, Brahma, Staropramen, Sibirskaya Korona, Chernigivske, Sedrin, Cass, Jupiler and whatnot. It’s now adding Anheuser-Busch to its list. Anheuser-Busch Inbev will own the thirst of China, USA, Russia, Brazil and

Germany.

While Beck’s is brewed here by Lion Nathan (whose foray into the wine business is not completely cool), Stella is brewed by Fosters. Like the local Heineken, they’re not European at all. So scour the atlas of the new leviathan’s holdings. Jeez, look, there’s a great big hole here called

Australia! Since it was still Interbrew, years ago, InBev has ogled the Fosters apple. So why would you let Fosters make your prime product taste like Melbourne beer when you could simply buy it – Fosters – whip up its dull suds, and ensure your Aussie Stella tastes more like a racy Belgian premium?

If/when Anheuser-Busch Inbev buys Fosters, which it may well do on its way home from China, it will reverse our dumb brewers’ disastrous forays into wine. There’ll be feathers all over the chookhouse when Fosters’ wineries hit the block.

PHILIP WHITE'S WINE PICKS OF THE WEEK

Dominique Portet Heathcote Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$42; 15% alcohol; cork(!); 91+ points
Since leaving Taltarni a decade back, Dominique Portet has built acute wines in the Bordeaux shape from the Yarra Valley and Heathcote, in the uplands north of Melbourne. Given the ideally cool, gentle weather of 2005, it’s surprising that he let this cabernet slime its way up to a Parkeresque 15%, but it’s still a lovely bloody wine, with that impossible-to-describe combo of leaf and lush – it could almost be Greenock Creek. The tannins are suitably velvety after all that gooey fruit, leaving a fig/date/fruitmince/suet/Chrismas pud

impression. Osso bucco, acid sauce. www.dominiqueportet.com

Cape Jaffa La Luna Mount Benson Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$38; 13% alcohol; diam cork; 93+++ points
Cape, mount, moon – don’t let the geography confuse you. This is the top red from Derek and Anna Hooper’s biodynamic explosion on the Limestone Coast. Pity their neighbours in the poor old Coonawarra haven’t caught the same moon juice mania: this wine’s thick with complexity and rare quality. Like the best bioluny adventures, it seems to have twice as many flavour cells per drip when compared to the everyday petrochem/industrial machine-world oozings from the vast monoculture of our south-east. It’s an essence: all the best cabernet bits without any water at all. Dolmades, cassis, dried fig, velvet... Cellar, or order saltbush mutton, now! www.capejaffawines.com.au