WINE AND FOOD SPECIAL

Uncorking a bottle of wine transforms unlimited potential into inexorable waste. Unopened, the bottle is loaded with latent possibilities, inaccessible, heavy in the hand as a grenade. The pop of the cork commits the wine to being drunk by the end of the evening, pissed away by morn- ing, remembered only in the context of the previous night's hilarity and the current painful sobriety. There is the Alka Seltza, there are the bottles, but what about the catalyst whose release made it all possible? Where is the cork? Generally thrown away without a second thought, the cork is the one thing shared by all wines whether they are fine pre-war vintage port, beaujolais nouveau, or merely Bulgarian ribena. Apart from champagne, where the first cork is removed to expel the sediment, the cork which is so casually thrown away has been inserted at bottling and remained with the wine until it is opened. Given this intrinsic, occasionally even intractable, role in the life of the wine, the cork might justifiably claim to deserve more attention than it is generally given. Its presence does after all make the difference whether the wine can be drunk or not.

The most expensive bottle of wine in the world was recently bought at auction. It was Château Latour 1895 which cost just under £100,000. The proud American own- er put it on public display, but unfortunate- ly placed it upright. Without direct contact with the wine, the cork dried up, shrunk and plopped down into the wine. As this happened overnight there was not even the chance to drink a toast before the wine

Where do corks come from?

Edward Whitley

oxidised. A salutory lesson not to ignore the cork.

Where then do corks come from? Who supplies them? Will they ever run out? The cork industry is centred around Portugal and Spain which together produce around 85 per cent of the world's cork. This is grown in wild cork oak forests along the deserted mountain range which forms the border between Spain and Portugal. As cork oaks thrive on dry sandy soil and great heat, they also grow in Morocco, Sardinia and the South of France. At first appear- ance, the trees of a cork oak forest seem horribly mutilated: their outer bark has been stripped off their trunks like the victims of some mass circumcision rite, the raw blackened trunks looking too thin and vulnerable to withstand the heat.

Although the trees are wild, there are strict regulations concerning the stripping of cork which prevent the trees from being literally skinned alive. Cork can only be stripped from a tree whose circumference measures at least 65cm. This generally means that the tree is around 15 years old before it is first stripped. Once stripped it takes an average of nine years for the cork to regenerate itself. A tree only begins to produce high quality cork, which is defined as having small lenticells or ducts, when it is around 50 years old. The cork will continue to successfully regenerate itself until it is some 200 years old. Despite the emasculated appearance of the trees, if the cork was not systematically removed it would continue to expand and squash the inner bark of the tree, eventually suffocat- ing the tree to death in a bizarre form of suicide.

The cork industry is as old as the wine industry. For as long as anyone can re- member the cork has been stripped off by fishermen who come up from the Algarve. In the same way as villages from Alsace always transmigrate to Champagne for the grape-picking harvest, the Algarve fisher- men travel up to the cork oak forests between June and October. These forests are in the most deserted parts of Portugal, well beyond the reach of roads, so the fishermen either walk or travel by mule. This journey was described by William Rankin, the first and only English cork merchant in 1855, with the following dispa- raging comments:

Feel very sore. The mule, notwithstanding all the padding felt like a razor on the back, added to which it went as if it had lost a leg (I forgot to look whether or not such was the case when I alighted).

The fishermen settle in the forest and

WINE AND FOOD SPECIAL

build huts out of cork bark. With the joints filled with moss, the encampment appears as a natural growth on the forest floor, a collection of mossy humps, and is virtually impossible to spot. At the edge of the camp they set up their bar which sells wine for five pence a glass and beer for seven pence a glass. The fishermen seem to enjoy trying to pole-axe themselves as well as the cork oak trees.

The production of cork is not only a lengthy process in that it takes nine years for it to grow, but all the stripping has to be done by hand. Given the cost of labour, it is uneconomic for either the Australians or the Americans to farm cork oak. Even the Portuguese finesse the cost of its produc- tion by transporting the strips of cork up to processing factories in the north where labour is traditionally some 20 per cent. cheaper. The Portuguese have exploited this economic discrepancy to good advan- tage and extended their hold on the dis- tribution of cork. In major wine growing areas such as Champagne there are estab- lished Portuguese families who run cork depots.

There is however one British family who is involved in the cork business. When the first William Rankin was bumping along so uncomfortably on his mule he was on his first-cork buying trip. In the same vein as the other Scottish expatriates who began buying port estates in Portugal — the Taylors, Grahams and Warres, the Ran k- ins bought a 5,000-acre cork oak forest. They still own this estate and a branch of the family still runs a cork warehouse in Bermondsey. It is a ramshackle warehouse with tiny wooden stairs, huge wooden beams and winches outside the top floor doors. Surrounded by modern warehouses and converted apartments it is reminiscent of all the charm London once had as a proper port. It is stacked high with sacks of corks, 1,000 in each. A cheap 2-inch cork for table wine costs about a penny, a top quality 3-inch cork for port or vintage claret costs nine pence.

If it seems extraordinary that a piece of cork which has taken nine years to grow, several days of manual work to prepare and which may then lead a useful life in the bottle for a further 60 years only costs nine pence, it should be remembered that the price of cork has doubled in the last two years and increased by 3,000 fold since 1979. The price rises have been caused by the advent of the Americans and Austra- lians buying the top quality cork, and the Bulgarians buying the low quality. The cork merchants who were in a declining market since the second world war as cork began to be replaced in its other important markets, chemists' bottles and life jackets, have suddenly found themselves heading

towards new peaks of demand. Even malt whiskies are now putting cork stoppers on their bottles as incontrovertible proof to their Japanese customers of their authentic traditions.

What about that old complaint of `corked wine'? The next time someone complains of corked wine, take a look at the bottle. It is more than likely that the wine will be a cheap, watery, poor vintage — possibly even an English wine. A strong healthy wine with a good alcoholic content will have little to worry about from any bacteria from the cork. Its alcohol will effectively pickle it. An unanswerable re- joinder which any wine waiter who knows the cork industry should say is that it serves you right for ordering such a namby-pamby wine in the first place.