Changing markets

A cork has become, by definition, the piece of cork that closes a bottle, in the same sense that “a chalk” is something you write with and “a glass” something you drink out of.

Cork’s insulation qualities, low density, durability, impermeability, and elasticity made it ideal for sealing wine bottles.

Over 15 billion cork stoppers a year are sold worldwide for wine-bottle closures, now accounting for almost 70 per cent of the cork market.

Of all the products obtained from cork, stoppers represent the greatest added value: a natural stopper can, for example, be worth as much as 25 times the cork board used for insulation material.

Vital to jobs
So the wine industry is vital to maintaining cork jobs and the cork oak forests.

But between 2000 and 2005, a fall in wine-industry cork-stopper sales of nearly 20 per cent worldwide was observed, according to one survey quoted in the WWF’s Cork Screwed? report.

Portugal in particular has experienced a big drop in cork stoppers exported to Australia and the US.

Other factors are at work. New consumer trends and winemaking techniques, as well as more competitive markets, have led producers to look for more technical or cheaper closures – plastic “corks” and metal screw-tops.

Consumers often don’t know whether the wine bottle they are buying has a plastic stopper until they open it; but a few retailers in the UK, for example, do put this information on the rear label.

Meanwhile, metal screw-tops are becoming more acceptable to consumers.
Scenarios in Cork Screwed? show that 1–2m hectares of cork oak forests could be lost in the next decade and up to two thirds of the entire cork oak forest area, with the loss – in the worst case – of more than 60,000 jobs.