The Cork stopper comeback
Portugal's vital cork industry has welcomed a decision by the French hypermarket giant Auchan to move back to using traditional corks for all its own-label wines, echoing an earlier move by the UK's Sainsbury food outlets.
Cork is Portugal’s second largest earner after tourism and the country’s main exporters, grouped under the Amorim Irmãos-led APCOR – Associação Portuguesa de Cortiça or cork producers association, is taking no chances that this vital industry should fail. Apcor says Portugal exported 2.5 thousand tonnes of champagne corks alone to France, worth 22.4 million euros in 2009 together with 3.4 thousand tonnes of natural cork stoppers worth 87.6 million euros. There was a time in recent past when world wine experts were anticipating the imminent demise of cork as the stopper of preference on wine and champagne bottles, destined they said to be overtaken by man-made materials. At the world’s biggest wine fair Vinexpo just held in Bordeaux, France, corks were popping all over the place as if to prove the industry’s vitality. Traditional cork-makers are said to be winning back market share despite the best efforts of the makers of synthetic wine stoppers and screw caps. Snobbery seems to be a significant factor behind cork floating to the top. Research shows consistently that global consumers believe bottles stopped with natural cork are just so much better than the synthetic and aluminium challengers.
Amorim, a Portuguese company that is the world’s largest producer of natural wine corks, registered record sales of 3.2 billion stoppers last year. Its business in Britain rose by 50 per cent, and António Amorim, the chief executive, predicted that even Australia, which led the move towards man made stoppers, would return to the bark of the cork oak.
The comeback of the cork is an enormous relief for many environmentalists, who had feared that the rise of the screw cap would lead to the destruction of Portugal’s cork oak forests, which are home to endangered species such as the Iberian lynx, Barbary deer and the imperial Iberian eagle. Mr. Aracil said: “The environmental issue has been very important in the revival. It is a key argument. Cork is renewable, recyclable, and biodegradable. Made from the bark of cork oak trees, it is peeled off in swirls once every 7-10 years and it grows back over and over again. A typical cork oak provides usable bark for up to 200 years.
