Editorial 8.6, June 2006, by Deirdre Helfferich Corkage The Cork Department of The Ester Republic has been receiving corks for many months now, and has enough to do about three to four panels of the six-panel kiosk planned for the Ester Community Park. Gluing began last month, and as I was sorting the corks by size and pattern in preparation for the initial affixation of the hundreds of cylindrical, spongy wooden or plastic stoppers, I marveled over the variety and artistry in this ordinary instrument of spillage prevention and purple prose inspiration. Corks come with an amazing breadth of mini art, stamped with birds, animals, buildings, landscapes, typography, and abstract designs. Most of those we are receiving here at the Republic are wooden, and feature grape leaves or bunches, or simply the name of the winery. Some are quite whimsical, for example, the bright orange corks that say “warble warble warble warble COUGH warble warble warble” all over them (Smoking Loon), or the one with the bear breathing flames (Toasted Head), or the seated hippo (Fat Bastard Wine). My current favorite is Three Blind Moose, featuring a moose in shades and a floating wine goblet on a screaming yellow plastic cork (“no shades required,” it reads). There seem to be a lot of kangaroos in the collection the Cork Department has, too—all that Australian wine. Some of the typography is rather plain, such as the corks from HOGUE or KENWOOD. Others really get into the fancy fonts: Trefethen, Diablo Creek. Some wineries are into playing little games on the corks, such as Justin, which lists just about everything: Just bowling, just dancing, just foosball, just another night, just Justin, just...well, you get the picture. Still others go for the elegant, minimalist look: no type, no cute pictures or puns: just wood. Or plastic, depending. The plastic corks are interesting. Most look like they’re pretending to be wooden, but fake wood looks nauseating, kind of a cat barf tan, like partially digested kitty kibble. Ick. The plastic corks I like have no shame: they are fearlessly artificial, uninhibited in color: purple (Leaping Horse), sky blue (7 Heavenly Chards), bright green, white with wavy orange and green patterns on them (Pepperwood Grove). I decided to Google wine corks, and came across an intersting site called The Natural Choice (www.corkfacts.com). The site has a brief history of cork’s use as a wine bottle stopper. The first people who used cork stoppers were the Egyptians, and then it became all the rage with the Greeks and later the Romans, who used it for house roofs, beehives, ship construction, and women’s shoes. I found out why a certain wine name was so famous (aside from the taste and the bubbly):
The website goes on to describe the founding of the first cork stopper factory in 1750, and the dominance of Portugal in the cork industry. The more I looked around, the more intriguing trivia I found. For instance, the Whistler Tree is a huge cork tree planted in 1783. The most recent harvest of its bark, in 2000, yielded 650 kilos, ten times the yield of an average tree. This is definitely a pro-cork site, with much information on the sustainability, recycling, and utilization of natural cork, and featuring a newsletter for the wine industry called Bark to Bottle. The use of plastic corks and screwtop bottles is gaining ground to avoid what is known as “cork taint”—and so far these types of stoppers are cheaper. However, the use of plastic cork poses a real economic threat to the three million acres of natural cork forests in Spain and Portugal, and to the animal and plant species living there. Cork taint is a stale moldy taste that derives from a chemical called TCA. These bad corks ruin about three to five percent of wine bottled. TCA can also be found in machinery or wine aging barrels, so improving production methods and inspection helps to reduce the incidence of spoilage. For the purposes of the kiosk, however, both types are useful, decorative, and recycled. Screw-tops aren’t much help, except to reuse the bottle! | ||
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