Natural stoppers are renewable resource: WWF
Mike De Souza, CanWest News Service
Published: Monday, October 22
OTTAWA - The average person probably won't know what it is when they take a sip of their favourite wine.
In fact, many wouldn't even notice the mouldy taste, sometimes compared to dirty socks, in their glass. But for wine-tasting experts, who could detect it in concentrations as low as one or two parts per trillion, a small sip would leave a bad taste in their mouths.
"It's not really a safety issue. It's not a health issue. It's a quality issue and it's costing the industry millions and millions of dollars," said Dr. George Soleas, a chemist who has spent more than a decade in the Canadian wine industry.
Poor-quality natural corks are the source of the problem, according to industry experts, who blame the faulty stoppers for tainting wine with trichloroanisole (TCA) and ruining some of the best bottles on the market. A recent American industry estimate pegged losses at up to $250 million a year.
But environmentalists are mounting a campaign to defend the natural cork, arguing the alternative solutions have dirty environmental footprints.
"It's very simple," said Chantal Menard, a spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Fund in Europe.
"If you use cork, you use a renewable resource, which is not the case for aluminum used in screw caps, and it's also not the case for oil or petrol, which is used for making synthetic stoppers."
Natural cork is harvested from the cork oak tree, which grows mainly in European and North African countries such as Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
Harvesters strip the bark of a mature tree that is at least 25 years old. When done properly, there is no need to cut down trees and the bark grows back in about a decade.
Soleas, also the vice-president of quality assurance at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, concedes that high-quality natural cork is still the best option for wine drinkers who want to store their bottles for a few years. The synthetic and screw caps block oxygen from entering the bottle and allowing the wine to age.
But since most customers consume their wine within a year, he said the Ontario liquor board favours the alternative stoppers to eliminate the risk of TCA tainting and its impact on sales.
Soleas defended the use of alternative closures, noting synthetic stoppers and aluminum screw caps can be recycled.
A peer-reviewed study in 2002 by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario tested 2,400 wines and found that 32 per cent of bottles with a low-grade composite cork closure were tainted with TCA. Six per cent of bottles with high-quality natural corks were found to be tainted, while none of the bottles with synthetic closures or screw caps were.
"Although you don't often get customer returns, because the majority of the customers don't know what the smell is, they just don't like the wine and they'll never buy it again," Soleas said.
The tainting problem from natural corks has caused a major shift for wine-makers over the past few years, according to Stephane Rein, a wine industry consultant in France.
"It's a very dynamic market and there's a lot of controversy," said Rein.
But he praised the WWF campaign as " an excellent initiative. ... It asks people to be conscious of the whole chain of production. They should know that when they buy cork, it won't have an impact on the forest."
The industry is starting to address the rapid rise of alternative closures and their impact on the environment, said Chris Thomson, the national sales manager in Canada for Cork Supply USA Inc.
"Of the three, natural cork is the most preferential in terms of doing the least amount of harm," said Thomson, whose company produces and distributes a variety of natural and alternative closures.
© The Edmonton Journal 2007
