One of the other great joys of a non-restaurant life is being able to cook for ourselves as a family far more frequently and in a greater variety of styles.

I've also had occasion to prove to myself conclusively that the vigourous sloshing of extra virgin olive oil on everything except desserts is much like wearing a ball gown to an inter schools rugby match or wearing a tiara for your weekly workout. It's just way over the top. Though in defence of the virgin, I have made an olive oil and Dewetshof Edeloes Polenta Cake!
A couple of our Cape wine farms are producing superb olive oils of the extra virginal persuasion. Morgenster, weighed down with international medals, is thick and unctuous and dark green. Love their lemon one! One of my current favourites is the Slaley Leccino. Leccino olives are used in Italy both as fruit and oil. Able to withstand adverse weather and some of the more common olive diseases, Leccinos offer a regular high yield. The oil from Slaley has a slightly bitter pungent fruitiness edged with sweetness. Interestingly light in colour too.

But - you need to know your virgins. There is a place for the extra virgin when cooking with the vibrant Mediterranean flavours of chilli, green and red peppers, onion, garlic. But for me it should be used as a condiment. As in with sea salt, freshly milled black pepper and good wine vinegar or lemon juice or verjuice. Or stirred into a risotto just before serving. The best risotto I have ever eaten was one made by Gary Rhodes - a vegetarian one with spinach and tomato - and he poured a thin stream of glistening green oil over the top; heated through, it added a sweet nutty delicate additional flavour component to one of the finest plates of food I have ever wrapped myself around!

Is it too much of a surprise then that there has been a paradigm shift in my approach to wine? Am I less demanding of what is in my glass? No. But it has given me the opportunity to drink perhaps a wider range of wines than I would normally - even tasting the much-criticised fruited wine: not bad with soda and ice! And experiencing more screw-topped than corked in both senses of the word.

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I am much amused by the continuing saga of the screwcap - the ice-cold stainless steel-like rational approach of the 'let's have a screw' brigade and the rather quaint and traditional 'hell, it's good to hear a cork pop isn't it?' cork-romantics. And have yet to be swayed either way, though I am leaning towards the screwcap, which has given me some of my finest wine moments. I have a friend who owns a vineyard in Queen Charlotte Sound in New Zealand who bought me some excellent bottles of New Zealand wine when he visited the Cape recently. One of them was a Palliser Sauvignon Blanc from Martinborough and screwed up it was and certainly amongst the finest Sauvignons I had ever tasted.

Later I was in Australia on one of my regular trips, eating at my all-time favourite restaurant in Perth - 44 King Street - with three other South Africans, two architects and a designer who were involved in the work I do at Voyager Wine Estate. Thought I'd give them a bit of a giggle and raved about the wine, leaving out the fact that it had a screwcap - 'well then let's have a bottle', they said. Wretched thing arrived with a cork in it!

The legendary Aussie King of Shiraz and sundry other varieties, Peter Lehmann, after offering a fairly robust Barossa comment on the screw had this to say in a recent email to me: 'Whilst offering a way, a light, a hope for reliable wine closures, screw tops are not a panacea for all ills. Cork will be around for some time to come.' Margaret Lehmann who chairs a local regional food group - have a look at www.foodbarossa.com - told me that they are 'putting all our Rieslings in screwcap, Sémillon and, shortly, our very fresh Rosé. It won't be long before all the whites are in screwcap, though there are some limitations in bottle shapes which doesn't bring joy to our marketing people.'

As an interesting aside, Margaret told me that the biennial Food Barossa Vintage Festival during the last week of April was 'an absolutely splendid celebration helped by absolutely wonderful weather, the sort you describe having in your neck of the woods. Now we are just looking for rain. It has been so dry, and I fear will continue to be a low rainfall year again. Oh dear. Vintage was short sharp and very shiny. Crops were down, but nature compensates by giving quality, so we anticipate some delicious 2003 releases.'

At the Trophy judging day at the Grande Roche Hotel in Paarl for the Fairbairn Capital Trophy Wine show, I sat next to James Halliday, noted Australian winemaker, author and judge and asked his opinion on many things so that I could have snippets of sage - sounds like a recipe - comments. When we spoke of screwcaps he said: 'People have the idea that the development of wine with a screwcap closure will be artificially arrested. Not so; there is sufficient oxygen in the wine and in the headspace to allow that part of development which requires oxygen to take place. And - what is more - much of the development takes place without oxygen.'

The head sommelier at Petrus, one of my chef-hero Gordon Ramsay's London restaurants, Alan Holmes, is quite pro screwcap. You may have heard last year that he was the one who sold about a half a million rands worth of wine to a group of five investment bankers dining there in celebration of a deal. Alan feels that screw-capped wines offered a 'more consistent product' and particularly suited young drinking and white wines, and he 'would recommend screwcaps for everyday drinking, lesser-quality wines'. That said, he does offer on his wine-list a screwcapped wine, a heavily oaked New Zealand Chardonnay, with a wholesale price of £14. This wine, like my Palliser, is also bottled in a corked version. 'We chose the screw-capped option because it was more reliable and I've never had any complaints from customers.'

The old romantic in him nudged its way through when he said he would be 'disheartened if screwcaps were to replace corks altogether. A lot of it is the romanticism of taking the bottle to the table, showing the label and then the theatre of slowly pulling out a cork', he said. 'It's all part of the show in a restaurant.' He also said that red wines intended for laying down would not suit a screwcap: 'I would be concerned about oxidation of the metal, which could give the wine a much worse flavour than cork taint.' Perhaps he's missed the fact that some metal caps have inner plastic linings. André van Rensburg of Vergelegen told me the other day he had tasted an experimental wine from one of the Cape's better known estates which had been in a screwcap for 20 years and that there was no visible deterioration of the plastic lining and certainly none in the wine.
I was interested in a line from Eddie Turner, a former Boschendal colleague of mine who now heads the Marketing and Sales division of Vergelegen, that while the supermarkets in the UK are demanding screwcaps, they seem to be demanding them of the wines in the £3.99 sector - which is not one in which Vergelegen operates. However a recent trawl through the supermarket shelves in London revealed some interesting prices for screw-capped Kiwi Sauvignon Blancs, £8.99 at Tesco and Unwins, £7.49 at Oddbins and a £6.99 red Australian.

At the other end of the wine market, about three years ago, one John Conover of Plumpjack Winery in the Napa Valley went screwy. He launched his $100-plus Cabernet with, if memory serves me correctly, half of the bottling in a screwcap. I phoned him at the time and he told me he was charging a premium on the screwcaps. 'How's the stock moving?' I inquired. 'Way faster than the corked stuff', was his reply. Can't win. can you?

Total convert, New Zealand's Bob Campbell, Master of Wine, recently said: 'I have one question for winemakers who for the time being continue to use corks. If you know that screwcaps will produce better and more consistent wine than corks, how can you continue to short-change your customers?'

This screwcap versus cork saga is, in the words of my 15-year-old son Peter, 'so not over'. Watch this space!


Michael Olivier, former restaurateur at Parks in Constantia, is a writer on food and wine. His subscription email newsletter Nosh can be obtained by an email to noshnews@ iafrica.com with 'subscribe' in the subject line.