Plastic, not axes, threatens cork forests
TEMPIO PAUSANIA, Sardinia (Reuters) - If you buy a bottle of wine with a metal screw-top or a plastic cork, you won't just be thumbing your nose at tradition. You may also be dooming the world's cork forests.
That is the view of environmentalists and cork producers who have joined forces to protect cork oaks -- and the unique habitat they provide -- from competition in the wine trade.
Alternative 'corks' are ever more common, as synthetic and aluminum wine closures have grabbed a 20 percent share of the market, up from just 2 percent in 2000, according to wine industry consultant Stephane Rein of Rein Consulting. He says that could increase to 35 percent by the end of the decade.
"Silicone corks are not a problem for quality wines, they'll always use cork," said Battista Giannottu, an agronomist who works with a consortium representing Sardinia's cork producers.
"But the mass market, which is 80 percent of the total, might (use synthetic corks). That's not just an economic problem but an environmental one."
The quercus suber, or cork oak, which grows on both the European and African sides of the Mediterranean, provides the raw material for practically all the 20 billion wine corks used every year.
The way cork is harvested -- shaved off the sides of trees like the way a sheep is shorn -- means forests continue to thrive as they give up their valuable bark.
In Sardinia, the only region in Italy that produces cork, the forests are a haven for wild boar, a species of hawk native to the island and Sardinian deer.
The highly endangered Iberian lynx roams the cork forests of Spain and Portugal, the global leader in cork production; in North Africa the forests provide a habitat for Barbary deer.
EXPERTS
"Only experts can tell when it's ready," said Saverio Bacio, overseeing the harvest at a Sardinian government-owned forest.
His woodsmen work quickly, hacking at the bark before the summer heat causes the sap to glue it to the trees' sensitive inner core which, if left intact, will produce another thick layer of cork.
"You can tell if the weather, the temperature, is right for the bark to come away without bringing part of the core with it. It varies day by day, hour by hour."
A cork oak must be at least 30 years old before the first harvest and, even then, the gnarled, porous 'virgin cork' is not good enough to make wine closures. It will take another 10 years for the bark to grow back and be good enough to make corks.
That means a poor rate of return compared with other trees which might be planted in such areas, such as the fast-growing eucalyptus which competes with cork oaks for land. Continued...
