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Think corks are bad for the environment? Think again. Screw caps may actually hurt the environment and the global economy. Get the full story about corks and wine from Willamette Valley Vineyards.
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Transcript

Mike Supple: You're watching Screw It on SuppleWine. I'm your host, Mike Supple, continuing my tour through northern Oregon's Willamette Valley. Today I'm at the well known Willamette Valley Vineyards. They produce a lot of great wines in good quantity, so you should be able to find them in local shops all around the country. I asked their winery ambassador, Wende Bennette, why Willamette Valley only uses natural cork as opposed to synthetic cork or screw caps, and she gave me the full breakdown about cork. Turns out it's much better for the environment than you might guess.

Wende Bennette: We use all natural cork. This is something that I'm incredibly passionate about, and it's something that a lot of people don't even know anything about. I asked a lady where she thought cork came from, and she said she thought it came from the ocean. Actually, cork is a forest - it's an oak tree that grows to be about 250 years old. The workers farm them, by every nine years, peeling the bark off the tree. [Shows example of the raw bark.]

They peel the bark right off, then they soak it and steam it and flatten it, and it becomes the piece against the wall here. [Shows large flat piece of cork.] Then they take that piece, and they cut it out like the strip that's on the box here, [shows small strip of raw cork] and they cookie-cut that out. And there's your cork.

So we use cork here at Willamette Valley Vineyards for four reasons:

1. Cork trees are a renewable resource. They grow and can be harvested every nine years, so a tree can see 16 - 20 harvests in its lifetime.
2. We also use it for revenue for a country like Portugal, where 50% of the world's population of cork comes from. And those folks there in Portugal have been relying on that revenue for centuries, and we want to continue to help support them and what they're doing.
3. Environmentally, cork trees are phenomenal. Those cork trees - there are ten million acres of them - absorb 4.6 million tons of carbon matter out of the air every year. Because of what they do, it makes it the second most important forest in the whole world, alongside the Amazon rainforest. On top of the fact that there's animals and plant life that rely on the forest - it's their ecosystem too. But if we aren't helping the revenue of Portugal, they're not going to be farming these trees and protecting these trees. So we have to be - in order to tie it in with the environment - using natural cork.
4. Cork is a recyclable product. When we're done with this product we can turn it into something else. Go from cradle to cradle instead of cradle to grave like plastic corks and, unfortunately, aluminum caps do. We started the very first cork recycling program in the world here. You can find these boxes [shows collection box] at Whole Foods here in Oregon, and by the end of the year we should be nationwide with our recycling program. So you can actually turn these corks into something else instead of a trivet or instead of a landfill. We can make them into shoes, sports equipment, floorboards, building supplies. We use ours for our packing materials.

It's a really great product, and well worth taking that second look at, as far as a consumer standpoint. Because that's really why the cork forests are going extinct. It's because of the consumer [buying less cork and more synthetic and/or screw caps]. It has nothing to do with the environment; it has to do with us personally using cork. Those folks out there aren't going to farm it if they're not making money off of them.

There's your crash course in cork!