Cork
as a Sustainable Managed Resource
Story
By: Mike Walsh
Photos
By: Mike Walsh & Roger Archey
Cork
is the only sustainable natural closure.
Cork
is an ancient, sustainable, ecologically friendly and
successfully managed resource with the vast cork forest
supporting the people and cultures of North Africa and
Spain, but mostly Portugal.
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Cork
trees can only be harvested every ten years, so to wind
through miles of cork forests with the rustic orange
shades of bare bark accenting the hues of the 100+ year
old trees, means they have been just harvested. The
white painted numbers on the bark indicates what year
the tree was harvested. If you see the number 6 painted
on the bark, that means it was harvested in 06 and should
not be harvested again until 10 years later. The very
fact of driving through miles of cork forest, with every
tree having a number on it creates a feeling of confidence
that the people of Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula
use an ancient common sense to preserve and sustain
their living off of the land.
Cork
production employs over 60,000 people in the tiny little
country of Portugal, with a significant portion of the
production coming from small family farms and operations
that do not have the resources that the large, factory
style cork operations have, and this has contributed
to our current cork taint problem.
This
is a sensitive issue, because the corporate culture
of one of the largest cork companies in Portugal, Amorim
Cork, does not want to take away the living of the smaller
farmers, rather they want to incorporate what they are
producing into their own factories, giving the farmers,
as well as the cork industry as a whole, the benefit
of their multi million dollar investment into the improvement
of cork production and the elimination of cork taint.
Amorim
Cork, one of the world's big 5 cork makers, has invested
millions of dollars in the cure for cork taint and their
patented process has truly made a difference in reducing
the problem dramatically. Additionally, a new huge modern
state of the art plant in the middle of the cork forest
serves to maximize the quality control. Ellen &
I visited this plant to see first hand a plant in which
the cork is boiled, checked, rechecked, tested, sampled
and then run through the secret patented process code
named "Rosa" after the inventors daughter.
Although a huge company that employs eleven hundred
people, this is still an Amorin family owned business,
employing families who are the children of the families
who started with the Amorim company generations ago.
The
art and science of cork have come together. Cork is
still the only thing that works to hold Champagne, because
it shrinks and expands to fill the space and it is the
only thing that allows great wine to age. In fact, at
the recent tasting in England of large numbers of plastic
corked & screw topped bottles, the wine tasting
panels found that 4% of the wines were tainted using
the plastic only. This means the wineries need to keep
looking for the problem. It's not always the cork's
fault.The following article by journalist Bob Ecker
(and fellow traveler) is about the rigorous and exacting
cleaning and testing methods of the Amorim Cork Company.