Cork producers get their act together, Portugal

Upon my arrival at Lisbon airport, Carlos de Jesus, marketing and communications director of cork manufacturing company Amorim, flings his arms around me in greeting. After years of seeking to deny or minimise the problems associated with their products, the cork makers are finally addressing the issue. I have been invited
to review Amorim's operations in Portugal, and De Jesus wastes no time in attempting to win me over.During the 1990s, the wine industry saw the rise of alternative closures as producers became increasingly intolerant of their wines being tainted by trichloroanisole (TCA), a compound found often but not exclusively in corks. This plunged the cork manufacturers into a crisis that they are still dealing with. My visit is to assess what progress has been made.

Amorim is the largest cork company in Portugal, six times bigger than its nearest competitor, Sabaté. With a turnover of €450 million, it sells over three billion corks each year, accounting for 25% of the global cork stopper industry. Not surprisingly, the company is at the forefront of efforts to rehabilitate cork.

Amorim has been at pains to install both "preventative and curative measures" concerning the incidence of cork taint in the manufacturing process. This applies to the other major producers as well, but De Jesus cannot resist pointing out that Sabaté has also diverged into the business of alternative closures. "Even though we have the sales force and market presence to make a success of alternative closures, we believe in cork," he comments.

First up, a visit to the forests. A particular innovation here is that the bark of at the foot of the trunk, which is particularly susceptible to taint, is cut off and not used for cork production.

However, while in the forests, I notice something disconcerting. Trees that have been stripped of their bark carry the year of harvest dabbed on with white paint. Usually it takes a full nine years between harvests, but here it appears that some trees have undergone two harvests inside that time: bark being stripped off to a certain level once and then higher up the tree three or four years later.

De Jesus admits that this places undue stress on the tree, which is why this practice will be outlawed by 2035. Nevertheless, the fact that this shortcut came into being at all is an indication that the Portuguese were not equipped to deal with soaring demand for cork as a result of the burgeoning global wine industry towards the end of last century, and the production process was compromised.

Next on to recently completed manufacturing plants in Caruche and Ponte de Sur. Both are in Alentejo, the principal region for cork trees, and each cost €9 million to build and equip. These are huge, rather stark facilities, designed to keep the manufacturing process as free as possible from TCA, and now account for 80% of Amorim's total production.

Changes to the cork manufacturing process include the elimination of contact between the stripped bark and earth with the planks now being stored in open concrete lots. A radical new boiling process alike to a surgical autoclave is used to clean the bark and, as a further pre-cautionary measure, the bark is run through an ozone chamber, which makes it difficult for the precursors of TCA to exist.

Later in the visit, I meet with Miguel Cabral, who has a PhD in Microbiology and is head of Amorim's research and development department. He has been working on addressing the TCA problem since late 1999. He points out that quality control, up until very recently, was done according to imperfect sensory means. Amorim has now installed six gas chromatography mass spectrometry machines across the company to the tune of €150 000 each. This means that batches of cork can be measured for TCA according to objective means and consequently accepted or rejected.
Another development that Amorim is hugely proud of is the ROSA method of removing taint from cork via steam extraction. As to what ROSA stands for, De Jesus provides a charming explanation. It emerges that Rosa was originally the name of the wife of the scientist on the project. When the marketing department needed something memorable to label the newly developed method, they decided upon the Rate of Optimal Steam Application, abbreviated to ROSA. All Twin Top corks (a body of granulated cork and disc of natural cork at each end) are treated using this method, which has seen a reduction of the incidence of TCA by 70% and over.

Cabral feels that such progress has been made fighting TCA that he and his team are now able to undertake new initiatives. In particular, he is fascinated by the question of how wine ages. There is an increasing body of evidence that suggests that screwcap can seal too tightly and thus contribute to reduction problems. Cabral contends that cork plays a crucial role in the ageing of wine because of the micro-oxygenation that it facilitates.

At this point, no one completely understands how ageing of wine occurs, but Cabral reckons oxygen must play some role. Cork has a degree of porosity, which potentially means oxygen passes from outside the bottle to the wine inside.

Alternatively, the average cork has 700 million cells filled with an air-like gas, which might enter the wine over time. Cabral hopes that with more research into the ageing process, it will emerge that cork is crucial for it to occur.

According to De Jesus, Amorim has invested €43 million in research and development over the past four years. There have also been plenty of press junkets and high-profile advertising campaigns during that time, and I ask De Jesus how the marketing budget stacks up. He is not prepared to comment other than to say "much less".

For all the progress made by the cork makers to arrive at a fault-free product, TCA is ubiquitous. De Jesus says that it is irresponsible to talk about the "eradication" of the compound and urges the cork and wine industries to work together to solve the problem.

Throughout my visit, De Jesus is refreshingly candid. He admits that cork producers did not react as quickly as they might have when TCA became an issue, but now that they have, much has already been done to eliminate the problem. He also points out that there is simply not enough cork to bottle all the wine in the world, which means there is necessarily room for alternative closures.

He accuses the all-powerful UK supermarkets of playing off natural cork producers against alternative closure manufacturers in order to come across as the champion of the consumer. "Screwcap is wine's mistress of the moment. Cork is the faithful wife," he proffers.

De Jesus also makes the point that the reason that Australia and New Zealand are such ardent advocates of screwcap is that they are both "laboratory countries", which is to say that they have scientific communities who benefit from being involved in the search to find alternatives to cork.

Amorim's commitment to delivering a fault-free product is unquestionable, but one of the key stumbling blocks to the entire cork industry transforming itself is that it is extremely fragmented. De Jesus estimates that there are around 600 different processing companies, many no more than "mom and pop" operations. While Amorim and a few other key players are improving their practices, it appears that by the far the majority of producers lack the wherewithal to do this. De Jesus says that there has been a lot of consolidation in the industry recently and this is set to continue.

After my visit, I have no doubt that the Portuguese are succeeding in significantly reducing cork taint. However, there are still corks in circulation that were processed when cork makers were a lot less focused on quality control, and when customers encounter these, cork's reputation will continue to suffer. Also, the restructuring of the cork industry needs to happen quickly: there is simply no room for small-scale, amateur operations producing faulty cork.

Nonetheless, there is every indication that the incidence of cork taint will reduce sharply over the next few years, whereupon the benefits of natural cork will far outweigh the disadvantages. So keep those corkscrews handy.