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Reflections from a new cork fan
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So I will readily admit that I was transfixed by the all information I learned about cork in Portugal. I had always been fond of cork; it's romantic, historical and has been a pretty darn-good closure for a lot of years. Despite all of this, I did get swept up in the excitement about alternative closures like screwcaps and plastic. I thought that they were easier to remove, less expensive and didn't damage wines that weren't meant for aging.
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A cork forest in the Alentejo in Portugal.
I have also not always been a fan of some of certain types of wine (I won't name names) that have historically been sealed with a screwcap. In retrospect I wonder if what I never liked was their closures and how they affected the taste profiles of these wines.
When I was visiting the world's leading cork producer Amorim, as their guest, I finally got a really good description of what reduction tastes like in a wine. It's too wine geeky a term even for me. But essentially I understand it to mean the closing down of a wine's flavors and the reduction of its aromatic and taste profile. The cork folks have done research and conclude this is happening a lot with wines seared with screwcaps. I quite agree. Let's not even talk about those plastic closures, who wants to drink something that has been aged in plastic?
The cork industry also attests that it has managed to reduce the incidence of TCA, which causes off flavors in wine, by 80 percent in the past four years according to the Cork Quality Council, a non-profit sponsored by many in the cork industry. I also believe this from experience. I have been doing event after event where I open dozens, sometimes hundreds, of bottles and often wondered why so few were corked. According to Amorim, the cork industry has taken the percentage of corked wines down from the five to 10 percent we used to believe we corked before to just one or two percent.
Cork awaiting processing outside a factory.
Not everyone agrees with me. I have interviewed some respected sommeliers who say they have seen no change in the amount of faulty wine under cork that they encounter. They deal with far more wine than I do (and you'll have to read some of my other columns if you want to hear their specific insights and they are on my lizathewinechick web site).
Improvement in the quality of wine we encounter on an everyday basis is the most important thing that we can strive for in the wine business. So if the number of faulty wines has declined and screwcaps may not be helping, even young fresh wines, to show better why shouldn't we all be pro cork?
Did I leave out the big environmental benefits? The 6 million acres of cork forests in the world offset 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to Amorim's research. Cork is also recyclable and biodegradable. I.e. you can you use it make great, cool floors and toys (the Portuguese even made a car interior out of it). These forests also balance the ecosystem and are a counterpoint to the dessert in arid cork-producing countries like Morocco and Tunisia. What's more the trees are harvested and not killed.
I have had a lot of feedback, both pro-cork and anti-, since my first post upon my return from Portugal. One reader intimated that cork producers were threatening to torch the forests if they couldn't make their livelihood. Most cork producers, like Amorim, don't own the forests and probably would encounter some legal problems if they tried to damage them. That aside, I think the great point is that if we don't come to understand cork's agricultural, cultural and environmental benefits, this product could be abandoned to make room for the next hot commodity.
Let's not let that happen. I welcome your feedback. Cheers,
Liza the Wine Chick
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