CORKS

November's Interesting Trivia page

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Simple, cheap and effective, the humble cork has a long history:

Cork's first recorded use as a stopper was by the Ancient Egyptians

Ancient Greeks also used cork oak bark to make fishing buoys, sandals and stoppers for wine and olive oil vessels.

The Romans found many uses for cork, including the construction of house roofs and beehives, in ship construction and for women's shoes.

In the 1600s, a French monk called Dom Pérignon, took a giant step towards the modern, most widespread use of cork — as a wine closure. Containers holding sparkling wine traditionally had been plugged by wooden stoppers wrapped in olive oil-soaked hemp. Dom Pérignon observed that these stoppers often popped out. He successfully swapped the conical plugs for cork stoppers and cork soon became essential for wine bottling.

Fuelled by a rapidly growing wine industry, demand for cork increased, sending ripples into Catalonia in Spain. The world's first cork stopper factory opened around 1750, in Anguine (Spain) marking the beginning of the industrial application of cork.

Cork stoppers arrived in Portugal around 1700. Some 70 years later they were used in cylindrical bottles in Oporto, allowing the wine to mature slowly in a glass receptacle for the first time.

The spread of mass-produced glass bottles with a uniform neck and opening helped to advance the acceptance of cork stoppers, not just for wine but a wide range of liquids.

 

Corked A tasting term used to describe wines contaminated by trichloroanisole (a corked wine is not one with bits of cork floating in it). This chemical compound is the product of mould infection in the cork. Said to affect 5% of bottles (some say more, some less) it is one of the main reasons behind the drive towards the increasing use of screw-caps and synthetic closures. It may result in a wine that simply lacks fruit and can be difficult to spot, or it may be horribly obvious, with cardboardy, musty, mushroomy, dank aromas and flavours, rendering the wine completely undrinkable.