Cork, It Seems To Be


• By Allen Dale "Ole" Olson   |   Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at 3:09 pm   |     |   Print   |   Permalink

As one who owns a hectare of cork oak trees on the French side of the Spanish border along the Mediterranean and one who has learned to appreciate screw tops on daily use wines, I confess to mixed feelings about a news release that reached my screen this morning. It came from a group I had never heard of: 100PercentCork.org, and, it should be no surprise, the release sang the praises of corks as the best stoppers for wine bottles.

It made the usual claims that  “cork is a safe, healthy, natural closure that protects wine better over time than metal-based or oil-derived closures.”  It points out that like rainforests, cork forests, such as those in Portugal, “sequester” carbon,” retaining some 4.8 million meric tons of CO2 every year, enough to offset the emissions of 830,000 passenger vehicles.

The release was triggered by the organization’s amassing more than 15,000 Facebook fans and their comments overwhelmingly advocating cork for wine bottles. The 100% Cork Facebook page urges readers to take the 100 Percent Cork Pledge for affixing to petitions to be sent to wine retailers and wineries asking them to increase their use of cork.

Because their campaign is funded by the Portuguese Cork Association and the Cork Quality Council, it is only normal that it should find so many favorable benefits to the use of cork. A big surprise, however, was the number of women cork advocates. Of the 15,000 respondents, 69% were women, the majority of whom are between the ages of 35 and 44. Those data give some credence to comments we have made earlier in these writings — that more women buy wine these days than men and that women now outnumber men in university hospitality degree programs.

We have also written that the jury is still out on how well wines keep in screw capped bottles, but we have found little praise for plastic or artifical cork stoppers.  And we will stop now merely to remind everyone that harvesting bark for corks does not harm the trees. We just wish there were more of them.

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