A WORD TO THE EXPERT


“This is a valuable process – explains Carlos Santos in an interview with Amorim Cork Italia – which is the basis of the whole cork industry, not just the production of wine stoppers, and is also a very important resource for the environment, because it is thanks to this activity that the cork forests of the Sea Mediterranean are protected and can thus help to stop the desertification of the environment and provide employment to the local population.

CORK CYCLE

It takes at least 43 years to produce cork. A virtuous process in relation to the times of Mother Earth and her rhythms. It takes 25 years from sowing to the first peeling, but the first cork is not suitable for the production of plugs and is therefore only used for the production of decorative articles and granulates. Another 9 years will pass before the second peeling, and another 9 before the bark of hundred-year-old trees can be made into cork stoppers: a minimum of 43 years in total. Devotion to the ecosystem and conscious use of a very important resource on which the work of thousands of people is based, only in Amorim.

NO MORE CORK TRACK!

But be careful, not only in the forest and in production facilities, a leading global company has been investing and working in the R&D sector for some time with significant results. Undoubtedly, the most important example is the fight against TCA (a chemical that forms naturally and is a problem in the food and beverage industry, for example the smell of cork in wine): NDtech® was born, a natural and above all guaranteed cork. An electronic nose that detects defective plugs actually eliminates pieces contaminated with trichloroanisole (TCA) before they enter the production chain.

The technological vanguard manages to detect the presence of a molecule with a degree of 0.5 nanogram TCA per liter (parts per trillion) and automatically remove harmful plugs; keep in mind that the detection threshold of 0.5 nanograms/liter corresponds to a drop of water in 800 Olympic swimming pools. “The NDtech® system required Amorim 5 years and €10,000,000 in research and development, as well as a partnership with a British company specializing in gas chromatography, but now the remote possibility of finding a bottle of re-flavored cork has been exceeded,” sums up Carlos Santosa.

"It's not good that it tastes like cork", you will probably never repeat it, and the sommeliers are already breathing a sigh of relief!

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