Cork Industry: It’s Still the Toast of Portugal

Whether it be Burgundy or Bulgarian, Champagne or chardonnay, the cork in the wine bottle is almost certainly Portuguese.

What Saudi Arabia is to oil or South Africa to diamonds, so Portugal is to the humble cork, long favored by winemakers to help age and preserve the fruit of their labors.

Some 80% of cork consumed in the world--whether in stopping wine or whiskey, stuck on the sole of a shoe or covering the floor--pops out of Portugal.

The Portuguese grow about half of the world’s cork and the rest they import, mainly from neighboring Spain and North Africa as raw material for the factories whose output earned the country $650 million in exports last year.

The warm, southwestern corner of Europe has always provided ideal growing conditions for the stunted cork oak trees.

The enterprise of the Portuguese has done the rest as they took advantage of the fact that their factories were close to the cork woodlands of the Extremadura and Andalusia, Spain’s main growing areas.

With the lifting of customs duties between the two neighbors on their entry into the then-European Community in 1986, Portugal was a more convenient destination for the bulky cork than the factories of Catalonia in Spain’s northeast.

The cork is the gnarled bark of the tree, cut by expert hands every nine years and then stacked in piles in the fields to “settle” for a year before being transported to the industrial plants.

Nearly 60% of all the cork exported from Portugal goes to the wine trade, with France being the largest single customer in terms of value, buying more than $134 million worth in 1995.

In recent years there have been attempts to float the idea of artificial corks, particularly plastic ones, as shippers experiment with alternatives. It is partly a question of price but it has more to do with the fact that cork is not 100% reliable as a sealer, particularly with poorer wines, for which a correspondingly lower quality of cork is used.

Shippers estimate that up to 10% of such wine can become “corked”--the musty and acrid taste that wine has when air has penetrated.

Britain’s Marks & Spencers retail chain, one of the country’s largest wine sellers, uses plastic corks in 17 brands, mainly the cheaper ones, out of 250 offered by its stores.

“Plastic is definitely a more efficient way of sealing a wine,” said one official from its wine importing department.

But he said that wine drinkers are not fully convinced. “The general public prefer the traditional cork,” he said.

One advantage of plastic corks is that wines do not need to be laid down. Usually, when wine is kept for any length of time it must be laid flat so that the cork is kept moist.

But a big marketing drawback is that, when pulled, the plastic cork does not give the satisfying “pop” of the real thing. Nor can thrifty drinkers stuff it back into the bottle if all the wine is not consumed.

Natural corks for Champagne come in five different standards, while there are six qualities of wine cork.

Some of the problem with “corked” wine comes from the mixing of different types which shippers request to keep costs down, industry sources said.

Despite the continuing search for alternatives and a decline in wine drinking in some European countries, Portugal’s cork producers remain confident that their future is buoyant.

“You can never replace a natural product like cork,” said Americo Amorim, known here as the “King of Cork” because of the huge stake his family firm has in the business.

“It allows the wine to stay dozens of years in a bottle, retaining its perfume. . . . For quality wine, anything but cork is unthinkable,” he said.