Over nine years, the outer bark slowly regenerates before the next harvesting cycle begins. Cork oaks are the only oak whose bark regenerates in this fashion, making Quercus suber a very special tree. On a cellular level, cork looks like a honeycomb of air pockets. This is the same reason cork works so well to age wine — its molecular structure makes watertight seals easy, but lets tiny bits of air move in and out, allowing the flavor and aroma molecules of wine to evolve and become more complex over time.
Only high-quality cork bark can be made into bottle stoppers, so repurposing lower-quality bark actually makes the industry more environmentally friendly go ahead and buy that cork purse on Etsy! Lower-grade or crumbled cork material can sometimes be used in composite corks, like the ones in many sparkling wine bottles. Today, those bits are used in everything from shoes to flooring. Shoes are critical, of course. But the cork forests of Portugal, Spain, Morocco, and Tunisia play an important environmental role, too.
At the same time, these forests provide a critical habitat for endangered species like the Iberian lynx and imperial eagle. In , a study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ecobilon concluded that natural cork production was actually more environmentally sound than the production of aluminum and plastic closures. Know what that means?
And don't worry, I'm no wine snob—you can also ask me those "dumb questions" you're too embarrased to ask your wine geek friends! I hope you find my answers educational, empowering and even amusing. I was looking at a bottle of Champagne that we had just finished and saw that the cork was about three times as wide as the opening. I have also seen that the corks in regular wine bottles are larger than the holes they fill.
How do corks get into the bottles? Corks are known for their elasticity, and can compress to about half their width without losing any flexibility, which is one of the reasons they're considered good closures for wine. Corks are cut larger than the opening they are going into, and then compressed before being inserted into the neck of the bottle. Sparkling wines have slightly different corks there are often a couple of cork discs glued to the bottom of the main cork body , which helps maintain the cork's integrity against all the pressure inside a bottle of bubbly.
Even though they come out in a "mushroom" shape, sparkling wine corks start out in a cylindrical shape before they're put into the bottle.
When the bubbly cork comes out, the disks at the bottom tend to expand faster than the rest of the body, hence the mushroom shape. Aug 8,
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