How Wine Corks Age

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 22:37:02 -0600, Cwdjrx

I find the trend towards screw tops on wine quite depressing. It's going to decimate one of the main industries in the Alentejo and other areas where there are few alternative sources of employment. Cork is an infinitely renewable resource, is biodegradeable, and will not sit around in rubbish dumps for hundreds of years like Teflon.

I'm very skeptical about tastings which report failure rates of up to 30%. I suspect any fault in the wine is nowadays ascribed to the cork. Even so, I think a few corked bottles of wine every now and again is a price we should be prepared to pay. I don't think it's fair for us wine drinkers to insist on a zero failure rate for corks, if a consequence of this is to destroy the livelihoods of people who have been involved in the industry for generations.

There are ways of improving the performance of cork, for e.g., by washing in hydrogen peroxide, but a large part of the problem is that the price for lower grades of cork has come down over the past 20 years or so, and so a great many of the problems that are emerging now arise as a result of bottlers using inferior cork in order to save money. -- * remove any trace of rudeness before you reply *

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