Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Cork and the Environment

Cork’s use as a wine stopper turns out to have important environmental benefits, because it keeps large cork forests from being cleared for other uses. According to Susan McGrath (HT: Andrew Sullivan), this is important because those forests provide key habitats for lots of endangered species:

“Because the native cork-oak woodlands around the western Mediterranean were never completely cleared, they still have some of the richest biological diversity in the Mediterranean,” says Jose Tavares, Portugal program manager for the U.K.-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). More than 100 songbird species breed in the montados, he says, including the brilliant, hummingbird-like bee-eaters; hawfinches and chaffinches, with their seed-cracker bills; and big, azure-winged magpies, little rock buntings, and cirl buntings. More than 160 other birds occur here, including many species that overwinter, such as lapwings and golden plovers; millions of wood pigeons and doves, from all across Eurasia; booted eagles and short-toed eagles, honey buzzards and black kites. A handful of very rare species find refuge here, too. Iberian mixed oak forests support the majority of Europe’s Bonelli’s eagles (now numbering fewer than 1,000 pairs), the last 180 breeding pairs of Spanish imperial eagles, and fewer than 100 Iberian lynx. Cork-oak forests across the Mediterranean, in Algeria and Tunisia, harbor some of the world’s last Barbary deer.

So should we continue to put up with TCS contamination and resulting corked wines in order to preserve the Portugese equivalent of the spotted owl? The greens thinks so:

“The cork oak forests could face an economic and environmental crisis unless we take action to secure their future now,” said Rebecca May, a forests campaigner at with WWF-UK. “It is vital that the wine and cork industries maintain the market for cork stoppers and in turn, help ensure the survival of the cork oak forests.”

Want to bet Ms May drinks green tea rather than claret?

To me, this is an easy question.

In my column, The Turn of the Screw, I came down strongly on the side of switching from corks to screw caps (more precisely, the Stelvin closure).

In my experience, wines capped with screw tops taste just as good as those closed with corks and, of course, loads better than those closed with tainted corks.

Despite the cork industry propaganda McGrath uncritically passes on, and despite the admitted progress that some cork producers have made, cork taint remains real and a very serious problem. As I wrote in the TCS column, hyper-sensitive wine critic James Laube’s estimate that 15% of bottles are cork tainted seems way too high, but the International Herald Tribune last year reported that cork taint used to be as high as 12%. According to the report, the cork industry claims to have reduced cork taint by 90%, but even if that’s true 10% of 12% is 1.2%, which means that in the best case scenario more than 1 bottle in a hundred will have to go down the drain. Neutral estimates, moreover, put the current percentage of bottles tainted by TCA from corks at 2 to 8%. So 5% wouldn’t be a bad guess.

So I say that, if the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds wants to save Portugese cork forests, let them buy up the forest land and put it into some sort of nature conservancy trust. Or let the Portugese government turn them into national parks. After all, it was decades of lousy farming and manufacturing techniques by Portugese cork growers that made cork taint such a widespread problem. Even so, I’d even be willing to donate a few bucks to the cause. But pouring up to 5% of my wine collection down the drain because of bad corks is not a price I’m willing to pay to save some Portugese hawfinches or, for that matter, chaffinches.