Put a cork in it! Claim: wine corks deteriorating due to 'climate change'

Great reading on the subject…
http://www.vinography.com/archives/2008/05/book_review_to_cork_or_not_to.html

Screw caps combined with plastic closures are more often used because the result after 5 or 10 years ageing of the wine is excellent. But people has to adapt that there is an alternative for the cork

Cork is better? Well, maybe. But I can’t help thinking of Blind-tested soloists unable to tell Stradivarius violins from modern instruments.

Always remember… no climate change link = not published / funded

Here’s a market response from one person buying wine in the North Okanogan region of Washington State – a fine wine producing region, I might add. I won’t knowingly buy a bottle of wine that has a man-made stopper. Use them at your own peril.
Corks do come in a range of quality and it is one of the things you takes your chances on, but I’ve personally found very few bad corks in the last 50 years and none in the last 20 years. There is a lot of crap out there that passes for wine, though.

More ‘wine-ing’, as usual, I see.

metal/plastic foil is typically added to bottles tops to protect the corks from drying out. There is more material involved in protecting the corks than simply using the same material as a screw top to eliminate the corks.

So now we have to stop AGW to save the cork industry.
Wow. You can see the next thing coming: they want special funding as AGW creates economic hardship for their industry. Now we have a study to prove it.
I have a bottle with screw cap any time over a cork one.
Ask any restaurant and they will tell you that they have far more bottles of wine being rejected by clients which had a cork then those with a screw cap.
I am sure that the quality of the cork will also play a part in that, should do a study but lack the funding, but why take the chance.
If cork quality is that important, and it is, to the aging process then these winemakers better make sure that they use good ones, otherwise use screw caps and be certain.

Wine has a long history that predates cork closures, glass bottles, and oak barrels. It even survived the hostile activities of the English and the French. Real cork is a fascinating item but fine wine can exist without it. We named a Brittany Cork.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphora
http://www.wineintro.com/history/glassware/general.html

Really?
Whiny whackos whining about Catastrophic Anthropogenic Wine Cork Disruption?
This isn’t environmentalism. It is overt mental illness.

Metal caps and plastic stoppers can be recycled if we will, cork can’t. But, on the other hand, when you toss your used cork it will biodegrade, metal and plastic are resistant to bio-degradation. You names yer pisin an yer takes yer pick.

I’m amazed that I heard Shepard Smith on Fox News (yesterday) attribute the cold temperatures in the midwest to “a thing climate change, have you heard of that?” Right. There’s no evidence at all that this cold is the result of global warming. It’s insane in fact, and this guy is on the supposed “fair and balanced” channel but is reporting just complete unsubstantiated hogwash. I mean, Fox is supposed to at least lean conservative, but to take an extreme position that the cold is caused by heat? I heard Shepard Smith might have some issues.

Waitaminnit… I’m confused. They’re claiming that “Cork quality has been decreasing over the years”, “hinting at a possible link to climate change.” But then they say, “Good cork had a higher abundance of heat-shock proteins, which help other proteins form their correct shapes even under stressful conditions. Heat-shock proteins also aid cellular division, permitting the growth of thicker bark. Previous studies have found that heat-shock proteins guard cork trees from ultraviolet light, high temperatures and drought — all of which have steadily become bigger problems in Portugal over the last century.”
So we’re getting inferior cork because global warming is causing trees to produce better cork?
And they base all this on one-time sampling from ten trees?
Well… I suppose it’s better than just looking at one Yamal tree.

By “multiple branches, I meant not only branches but twinned trunks.

Even if true, who other than a bunch of effete metrosexual .001%ers gives a flying cork?

@ Eric Simpson –
I think you might want to recalibrate your irony-meter.
@ Harold
It’s not just effete metrosexuals. Us hard-core drunks like wine, too.

I buy wine in bulk, in 5 liters Tetra Brik packages that come with a plastic faucet at the bottom. One of those with a rubber bubble you press and the wine drains off the Brik. The local Red Rioja wine goes for around $10 (7 €) at the farmers market. Since the Brik is too bulky to put it on the table, I have a bottle with a recycled cork which I refill every 3 – 4 days.
That kind of packaging is gaining popularity around here.

“It’s Worse Than We Thought” [TM]

LeeHarvey says:
July 16, 2014 at 12:44 pm
@ Harold
It’s not just effete metrosexuals. Us hard-core drunks like wine, too.
—–
But you drunks won’t know the difference between a designer pre-industrial artisanal cork and an industrial anthropocene GMO cork.

@Mark and two Cats: “cork soakers”. Yeah, I got it, ROFLMAO!

The single biggest threat to cork plantations is property development.

Ridiculous!!!! The bung pluggers union, both beer and whiskey barrels, will never accept the wine-ies having priority access to cork.

Maybe these researchers are cork soakers –

Figures. It just figures. All that hoo-haa about cork only growing in one area, and I read in the comments that it just ain’t so. If cork only grows in that one area it’s because people didn’t plant trees elsewhere. When somebody DOES plant a tree elsewhere– it grows there too. Who knew?
I wonder now, how many crops do we have that only come from one area of the world do that because they HAVE to grow there and nowhere else, and how many grow there only because nobody has tried to grow it anywhere else.

“Harold says:
Even if true, who other than a bunch of effete metrosexual .001%ers gives a flying cork?”
If I have a major biodegradable beef on the content 0f this site – which is typically excellent, especially when it highlights Godzilla and/or cow flatulence – I’d have to say it is – there is just too much hoity-toity wine talk. Perhaps it is all the international/worldwide influence here. Listen folks – only Murica and Eriador matter. Wine is unheard of in Eriador – an elf visiting on holiday might be caught sipping it once in a while, but they have always been strange like that and we never take them seriously – and a dwarf would throw away his ax and sit down to supper with a Goblin rather than drink wine. As for Murica – true Muricans only quaff the finest hops & malt. I bet Michael Mann is a prodigious wine drinker – probably white wine too.
Have spent a part of the last few days listening to some of the conference videos – all youse guys are fantastic, and I bet most of you prefer donuts and beer over wine. Very very well done!

You can generally tell when a rabidly dictatorially and power grasping movement or organisation or a cult has reached it’s use by date when it is no longer regarded and commented on with a discomfort or a disgust or an anger or even a revealing of a deep seated fear of the movement when commenters start to use sarcasm, irony and open contempt when commenting on the movement / cults latest offerings.
We are seeing this large shift in attitudes right here and now in the comments above and in many recent past posts and comments on WUWT
We are seeing a similar trend right across the full spectrum of the skeptic and some luke warmer climate blogs in the shift in attitudes from a concern about the increasing power and influence of the climate catastrophe cult to a confidence that the worst that the man made climate catastrophe cult can do to our society and peoples is now past and the cult is in a long terminal decline towards a well deserved oblivion.
I see the ever increasing sarcasm and the ever deeper irony and contemptuousness of the comments above for the output of claimed, so called climate related research and look at all those other similar in trend comments and blog posts on other skeptic and luke warmer sites plus the very well deserved opprobrium that is being heaped by all sides in the climate debacle on an increasing cascade of what can only be described as climate catastrophe science reports and papers.
It seems blatantly obvious when one looks at the avalanche of publicly funded, deeply flawed, often opinion only, unsubstantiated, unvalidated and data-less reports and papers that are passed off as some form of climate science then it becomes apparent that nearly all of those papers are seemingly written by a whole generation of either grossly dishonest or deeply deluded and / or intellectually challenged climate catastrophe carpet bagging cultist researchers.
It is through this deliberate and gross corruption of what science is truly meant to represent that climate catastrophe science and it’s adherents are finally getting their self created and malodorous reputations which they themselves have created through their own arrogance and stupidity and their total lack of any demonstrable scientific, intellectual, ethical and moral rigor and honesty.
With sincerest apologies to Winston Churchill;
This is not the end.
It is perhaps, the end of the beginning.
And it is perhaps the beginning of the end.

Well most of our wine accept bubbly stuff, has screw tops.

Portugal, where most corks come from, are not making enough money to sustain the cork industry. The cork oak is also the home of the European Lynx, an endangered species, and survival of the oak forests vital for this animal.
The answer is to buy wine only with a cork stopper.

Unlike most of the commenters here I’m a credentialed wine expert. I finished fifth in the California Wine Tasting Championships about twenty years ago.
The best way to package wine is clearly in a box. The wine stays fresh indefinitely. Back when I was a sucker for wine gizmos. I had this thing that refilled the space above the half empty wine bottle with nitrogen. The idea was that oxygen would oxidize the wine. That empty space is always present in any hard container like a bottle but a box has a sterile plastic liner which contracts as the wine is remove.
I have outgrown wine gizmos. I now spend my spare cash on coffee gizmos.
I have Safeway deliver a 5 liter box of Almaden cabernet or chardonnay every month or so. I keep it on a shelf in my refrigerator. Almaden is an excellent mid-quality vin ordinaire. That means it is vastly better than anything you are likely to get in Europe unless you are buying a bottle made for the export market.
The joys of boxed wine would be clear to all if the wineries would only package their best wines in boxes. My favorite Chardonnay is probably Rombauer’s. It’s about $30 a bottle these days and it sells out quickly. Given the economies of scale and the lower expenses of materials, a five liter box of Rombauer Chardonnay could probably turn a profit at only a hundred dollars a bottle. Me want.
But because of codger superstitions the really good wines are only sold with corks. OTOH here in the Bay Area we are close enough that some entrepreneur will likely run a pipeline from Napa and we will have wine on tap in all our houses. No corks, no bottles, no boxes,
[Thank you! .mod]

It’s worse than we thought.
97% of scientists prefer their wine with a cork and the lowly deniers prefer it with a screw cap for quality and accessibility reasons.
The fact is, there are far more chances of the cork making the wine go off. It’s a throw back into the dark ages. There’s no shortage of cork. Also known as the fire oak. Whole woods of the stuff grow barely used in Southern Spain. Every so often they will peel some off to rot the next batch of posh wine while the ordinary public buy the stuff in cardboard boxes like we buy sterilised milk..