The multilingual vocabulary of wine can make people feel tongue-tied, but the pop of a cork transcends all language barriers. There are few other sounds in the world quite so synonymous with celebration. Whether you’re opening a fine bottle of wine, a well-aged port, or even a cheap bottle of fizz, that pop announces the party.
Cork has been used as a stopper since the time of the ancient Greeks, but it wasn’t until the 17th century, and the advent of glass bottles, that it became the standard wine seal. Some of the advantages of cork closures are that they are watertight, sustainable, and good for color stabilization. Additionally, cork’s breathable nature allows the wine to develop over time with a small ingress of oxygen. It was the best—and practically only—option for centuries, providing over 95 percent of wine closures at its peak in the late 20th century. Today cork is used for more than 70 percent of closures, and more than 12 billion cork stoppers are produced each year, mainly from cork forests in Portugal and Spain…
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