Is cork is on the rebound? After a decade of soaring growth for screw caps, bark is beating back the aluminum assault.
Over the past 16 months, shipments in cork wine stoppers from Portugal – which supplies the majority of the material to the industry – grew by 19.4 per cent, mainly reclaiming market share from plastic “corks” but also modestly gaining on screw caps. In the same period, the global wine industry expanded just 1.5 per cent.
“It’s not exactly the death of cork that a lot of people were talking about six years ago,” said Carlos De Jesus, marketing and communications director for Portugal-based Amorim, the world’s largest supplier, with record sales last year of 3.2 billion units.
It’s Champagne-popping news for the cork trade, which has seen its share of the annual 15-billion-bottle wine market tumble to 70 per cent from about 95 per cent in the mid-1990s. Hoping to reverse the trend, companies such as Amorim have waged a publicity war, mainly by tugging at consumer heartstrings. Cork is the bark of an oak species that, once stripped, regenerates within 10 years. Producers argue that the 2.3 million hectares of cork forests around the western Mediterranean neutralize greenhouse gases, harness biodiversity and yield some of the highest-paying agricultural jobs on the planet (labourers pocket 85 to 90 euros a day). And you thought sipping merlot offered a refuge from politics.
Amorim has even produced a tongue-in-cheek video featuring former Saturday Night Live comedian Rob Schneider attempting to save a cork tree named Miguel (posted on www.savemiguel.com and YouTube).
Cork’s comeback coincides with a growing perception that the industry is finally stemming the tide of cork taint, a pollutant that smells like wet cardboard and subtly robs wine of flavour. While still a problem, the incidence of conspicuously “corked” wines appears to have declined, by some estimates to 1.5 per cent from a high of 5 to 8 per cent.
Credit better detection and production techniques in what had been a largely primitive industry. Chemically known as 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, or TCA, cork taint forms when a randomly occurring fungus combines with chlorine, usually from rainwater or washing equipment.
Ironically, the stirrings of a cork renaissance also comes on the heels of mounting research suggesting that screw caps may be as effective in permitting red wines to improve with age. So far, most screw caps have been reserved for early-maturing wines not intended for the long haul.
This summer, Hogue Cellars, a large Washington state producer, switched entirely to screw caps (from 70 per cent previously) after a five-year sensory study comparing otherwise identical wines sealed with various closures, including natural corks, synthetic corks and screw caps lined with different materials.
Reds bottled under screw cap in 2005 were “beautiful, well-developed, just as if there had been a really good cork in them,” said Coman Dinn, Hogue’s director of winemaking. “In some cases, we really liked the cork-finished wines, but often there would be off aromas that you detected when compared side by side with the screw-cap wines.”
Villa Maria Estate, a respected New Zealand winery, moved entirely to screw caps 10 years ago with favourable results. A recent in-house tasting of its top-end cabernet sauvignons from the 2000 vintage “indicates that these wines have matured elegantly, consistent with what you would expect if you had 100-per-cent fault-free corks,” said Ian Clark, Villa Maria’s export manager.
Plastic corks, meanwhile, have been widely disparaged because they’re not as elastic as natural cork, letting in too much air. Several producers have gone bankrupt.
Prevailing wisdom held that wine needs a slow ingress of air, such as that offered by the microscopic pores in natural cork, to develop attractive complexity. Screw caps were seen to be too tight.
