Can Cork Survive?

Recently I was contacted by Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Would I like to inspect the cork forests of Spain and Portugal, the society wanted to know, and observe the various species of birds that might be endangered if the wine industry were to abandon the use of cork?

This proposition arrived a day or two after I received the first edition of a new full-color glossy publication called something like Cork News, whose front page featured Australia’s most voluble wine man, Len Evans, declaring his personal faith in the wine cork.

The cork industry is clearly on the defensive. It’s spending a sizable part of its budget on a public relations campaign that leaves no angle, however obtuse, unexploited.

This is no surprise. As consumers, most of us have sorry tales of “corked” wines. My own experience of cork taint reached its most financially painful point last year when I was conducting a tasting of some of Tuscany’s finest reds at the sybarite’s haven that is Gidleigh Park Hotel in Devon. The star of the lineup was a bottle of 1985 Sassicaia, one of the finest wines I have ever tasted and one that commands three-figure prices.

After one ominous sniff, those of us in denial of the obvious truth went ahead and tasted a mouthful of hard, mouth-pinching, utterly fruit-free spoiled wine. The owner of Gidleigh Park manfully but grimly replaced it with his next-to-last bottle of this fabulous wine.

The next week, when I had a crowd to dinner at my home, I had to make the same rueful trudge to my own cellar. And which bottle was spoiled by cork taint? The 1983 Landonne from Guigal, replacement cost also well into the three digits.

For wine producers, bad corks can be galling on a much greater scale. The Australian monolith Southcorp (Penfolds, Lindemans and a score of other names), which has been taking an admirably pro-active line on all this, reckons that if it had continued to stopper all its bottles with cork, someone somewhere would be landed with a tainted bottle of a Southcorp wine every 78 seconds. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the company has been trying out alternatives on its customers.

Australians incline more to technical perfection than to romance, so Southcorp’s favored replacement is the humble screw cap. Scientific research suggests that the screw cap and the crown cork--that crinkly-edged metal cap levered off millions of beer and cola bottles every day--can be much more reliable than cork. For wine designed to be drunk within a year or two (which is 90% of all wine), these distinctly unglamorous stoppers provide a completely effective seal with no risk of cork taint.

The problem, though, is that they are not just plugs; they are plug-ugly. I don’t see why we have to borrow existing stoppers. Surely some enterprising designer could come up with a stopper that is as effective as these two, and not more expensive than cork, but that looks as stylish as we wine drinkers deserve.

This leaves fine wine, of course, for which most authorities believe natural corks are the ideal stopper because they bring a certain je ne sais quoi. And no one fully understands what role is played by the minute amounts of oxygen that a cork can allow into a bottle over the decades, possibly to the benefit of the aging process.

I happen to feel a certain illogical, often-frustrated affection for natural corks. They have worked, even if we don’t know why, for at least 300 years. I like the fact that they are a natural renewable resource and biodegradable, unlike the plastic imitations that have been adopted by certain producers unwilling to accept cork taint but equally unwilling to tell their consumers that all that “romantic” wrestling with a corkscrew is actually unnecessary.

The problem with natural products, though, is that they are irregular and unpredictable and do not succumb happily to industrialization. In the early 1990s, when I visited a cork processing plant in Portugal (one of the biggest and most sophisticated in the world), I was fairly horrified by what struck me as almost Victorian conditions. The man who showed me around described my subsequent account in the Financial Times as “verminous prose.”

And I thought I had been relatively sympathetic to cork producers: I’d pointed out that cork taint is not always their fault. Problems can arise because the wineries don’t always store corks properly. A contaminant called TCA, found in a handful of wines, has been shown to be caused by contamination from an insecticide used on wooden beams or possibly pallets.

If I were a cork producer, I would not spend money on trying to curry favor with the media. I would invest it all in the following:

* Serious large-scale research into exactly how the aging process of wine under cork differs from that of a wine sealed by a screw cap, crown top, plastic imitation cork or my as-yet-to-be-conceived stylish alternative perfect seal. Exploit your advantages!

* Dramatic upgrading of cork processing and investment in new equipment. I am probably out of date by now (and my verminous-prose-hating friend would probably not allow me back into the cork plant), but on that visit I was shown a thoroughly modern, reliable way of treating the discs of cork that are put on the bottom of Champagne corks. The high-tech equipment made the resulting corks much more expensive, but what matter if that’s what it takes to eliminate cork taint? Corks are a relatively minor cost for wine producers; perhaps they should be educated to pay more for them.

* Consideration of Portuguese winemaker Joe Neiva’s scheme to use ozone to disinfect corks. He claims to have tried this for six years without any incidence of cork taint.

But perhaps the most important step for the cork industry is to stop treating the media and the wine industry as the enemy. We’re all in this together.