alternatives have both proved highly popular with wineries looking to find a more convenient and cheaper substitute for their bottles of wine. The problem is that as a natural product, cork is variable and often proves unpredictable: Not only can it crumble, break and at times leak, it has one very serious flaw – bad cork can very quickly turn that fine 1990 Burgundy you have been saving into a musty-smelling, cardboard tasting liquid. This corked, or ‘tainted’ effect as experts like to call it, is predominantly due to a contaminant harboured by cork known as 2,4,6 trichloroanisole, TCA for short. Humans are so sensitive to TCA that even at an incredibly low dose it can, and does, spoil a
percentage of screw cap and synthetically corked bottles available is still low at about 8 per cent.” he says, “I expect this will rise quite significantly over the next couple of years, possibly even as high as 30 per cent.” He names the entrepreneurial vintner Vicente Taberner’s recent Barbarossa wine as an example of the screw-cap’s increasing popularity. “This is an imaginative rosé wine grown locally in Arcos de La Frontera which has been widely received and praised despite being bottled with a screw cap.” So has the introduction of the plastic cork already affected the global demand for cork? Cork farmers have long complained about the volatility of the price of their product, which tends to
‘The global use of cork as a stopper has a huge environmental advantage, and also plays a crucial role in the local rural economy’ vary from year to year. However, last year local farmers in the Los Barrios area reported a much more significant decrease in the demand for high quality cork. This year they are expecting a similar predicament. During a two week harvest, a five-man team can expect to yield up to12 quintales (an old Spanish unit of measurement that is still applied to cork; one quintal is approximately 46 kgs). Ten years ago cork farmers could charge buyers up to €80 per quintal but last year the price offered was not even half this. José Ordonez, a cork harvester on a private farm near Alcalá de los Gazules, says more than 70 per cent of last summer’s cork harvest is still lying on the floor of the forest waiting to be sold for the right price. Some farmers have refused even to farm their cork, preferring to leave it on the trees and avoid any risk of damage.
PHOTOS PROVIDED BY GRUPO DE DESARROLLO RURAL DE LOS ALCORNOCALES
perfectly good wine. Some vineyards report an incidence of one in 10 corked bottles of wine which, when you consider that the cost of a cork can be as high as €1, can result in a significant profit loss. For New World wineries in Australia, New Zealand and South American, the screw-cap alternative in particular is an extremely popular choice, especially for their younger wines. For years these wine producing countries have suffered high export prices of cork from Spain and Portugal. Convenient, easy to reseal and (at €0.20 per stopper), the screw cap has become a lot more economically attractive than cork. Even Spanish wine merchants known for their traditional taste are beginning to look upon the screw cap as a viable alternative. Louis Ruiz, of Aponiente restaurant in El Puerto de Santa María, says there is an increased presence of synthetically bottled wine on the market, including wine from local vineyards. “Although the
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