Last year the wine industry topped eighteen million of its bottles with natural corks made from the bark of the cork oak tree. Just prior to that there were rumblings of a cork shortage swirling around the wine and cork industries as well as the wine consuming public. But the concern surrounding the cork industry and using natural corks doesn’t actually concern anything to do with overharvesting a limited natural resource as one might assume. Cork is not produced by harvesting whole cork oak trees for the product; cork stoppers are produced from the bark of the tree only, which regenerates. The trees will live for two to three hundred years and during that time, the bark is stripped off about every ten years to make corks.
Now there are two cork recycling programs out in public – ReCork America, and Cork ReHarvest, which you may run into in wineries' tasting rooms on wine country tours or at natural food grocery stores. The programs are designed to collect used corks for recycling but they are also stations for education. The environmentalists’ interest is to promote the romantic attachment to natural corks and help the industry to thrive. Their concern is that with a move toward the more effective and less expensive synthetic corks and twist-off caps, and the resulting decline in the cork industry, will lead to much of the nearly seven million acres of cork oak trees being abandoned, leading to wildfires and threatening wildlife. And as this biosphere, and the many species within it, is second only to the Amazon rain forest in size, these Mediterranean area focused trees should be preserved with diligence.
