Finally, I absolutely love 'screw caps'! NZ has a special 'screw cap' organization (forget the official name) which is pushing to get the whole country to switch over (which I believe will happen); one of the Bordeaux 'Grand Crus' just bottled half of a wine w/ corks, and the other half w/ screw caps (in the same issue of Wine Spectator)! 
Screw caps are becoming more common in Germany too. There is a significant financial loss with returned wine that is corked and the vintners are beginning to rebel. Mrs. Rock is employed by a corporation that makes them. More interestingly, they also market a recent invention called the Vino-Loc. O mentioned drinking a 2003 Schloss Vollrads. That was the year Vollrads began to use the Vino-Loc. Like that Bordeaux estate you mention, Vollrads bottled some of the vintage with corks and some with the new enclosure, giving their customers a choice. I like the Loc (and screw caps) because I can store the wine upright.
The Vino-Loc is made of tough, shatterproof glass and has a small plastic seal that renders it airtight. It's really easy to get on and off. It looks like this when it's in the bottle:
and here it is out of the bottle:
On the label, the term "erstes Gewächs" means
premier cru or first growth. It's a new quality level, not sanctioned yet by the government's wine bureaucracy. Many of the top vintners, unhappy with the way German wine is produced, labeled and marketed, banded together and took it upon themselves to raise standards and denote certain vineyards as the best. A wine labeled
erstes Gewächs has to be a Riesling. It has to meet stringent ripeness and yield levels, has to be vinified dry and pass a peer taste test. Ironically, and idiotically, the German wine laws won't allow the words on the label along with the QmP designation. Instead the wine can only be called a mere
Qualitätswein, one of the lower categories. (Same with the word barrique. If that's on the label, it has to be marketed as a mere table wine even if the wine really is a dry Auslese!)
The label is designed to simplify things, especially for foreign consumers. Instead of the unwieldy term
Niersteiner Brudersberg Riesling Spätlese trocken, the label says simply,
Brudersberg (the vineyard name). One can assume it's a dry Riesling Spätlese from Nierstein. The hope is that eventually the vineyards will become well-known and synonymous in the consumer's mind with high quality the way the Burgundy vineyards are.
Sarge
