If you love the Law, sausage, or even corks in your wine bottles, you don’t ever want to see them made (to paraphrase an old saying). This was one of many lessons learned on my last trip into Spain with one of our winegrowers when we went to visit his supplier, a family-owned business located just south of Figueres.
Starting with dried bark from Cork trees, the process involves cutting, bleaching, and polishing little plugs from the bark, and winds up in plastic bags holding 20,000 finished corks. Along the way, unfortunately, a small number of the finished corks wind up tainted by the cleaning agent, or polished to a diameter just shy of what’s necessary to effectively seal a wine bottle.
This small number adds up to a lot of corks, when you take into account how many are produced, and this leads many wine producers looking for alternatives. The photo at top shows two of the “alternative closures” being used by some of our producers (alongside the more familiar cork). When you see one in the stores, don’t panic…these closures have so far proven to be very effective at keeping the wines inside the bottle fresh and vibrant…and they have the added benefit of being free of possible “cork taint.”