CORK AND PORTUGAL: WHERE DO THE CORKS FOR OUR WINES COME FROM?
What is the first thing that comes to mind when we think of Portugal? The azulejos that adorn Lisbon, the heart-rending romantic music of Fado, the cod with its most authentic preparations, the wonderful sweet Pastéis de Belém, or maybe wines such as Porto del Douro (the first DOC region in the world), Madeira and Vinho Verde from the north of the country? Probably all this together creates a picture of the wonderful country that is Portugal. But that's not all, the nation that gave birth to the discoverer Vasco da Gama is the world's heart of cork production, the best multi-functional material on the market, chosen for bottling our wine bottles and more.
The Portuguese cork forest is considered one of the 35 biodiversity reserves in the world, and a large part of its global production comes from here every year. Portugal is the first producing country with around 52%, followed by Spain with 25%, followed by all other Mediterranean countries including Italy with 6% of world production, of which Sardinia accounts for 4%.
About 12 billion corks are produced in the world each year, of which virtually a third comes from the plants of the Portuguese company Amorim, in operation since 1870.
From composite stoppers, made from pressed cork grains, to whole stoppers, still carved from bark without the aid of an automated procedure.
The Alentejo forest is probably the most intense in Portugal, here the oaks take 25 years to start corking, and dehulling (hand peeling off the bark) can only take place every nine years. The numbers appearing on the bare trunks are used for "counting", i.e. for remembering the date of peeling, which can only be carried out again after a decade (comparable, for clarity, to shearing a sheep). Normally, the cork plant reproduces 15-20 times in its life, and its treatment takes place every year in May, June and July during the process of extracting the raw material, one of the most delicate and respectable that can exist in nature.
“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.
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