'Cork Wars' Are Stopping Up the Wine Industry

The rarefied world of wine enthusiasts is all so very civilized. Public spats simply are not done. Name-calling and hair-pulling are the sole province of beer drinkers (the swine).

Well, until recently. These days, golden goblets and long-stemmed flutes alike are roiling with turbulence. The unseemly bickering centers on an unlikely lightning rod: the wine cork.

An odd group of wine enthusiasts, supermarket chains, the plastic industry and the likes of Bill Gates have declared the death of cork. In opposition, a hodge-podge of pro-cork interests -- ranging from wine purists to environmentalists to subsistence farmers to the government of Portugal -- are rallying to cork's defense. Or, to frame it as the combatants have: the greedy, lying anti-cork jihad bent on destroying the habitat of endangered species against the greedy, lying natural cork crusaders bent on destroying the world's finest wines. Let's just say there is very little middle ground here.

It all stems from an affliction, found in both the expensive varietals and the cheap table wines, called "cork taint." A "corked" wine, according to experts, tastes cardboardy, "cheesy," musty, or flat. But no one is really sure how or why some corks become tainted. The taint itself can be traced to a chemical called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), which gets into the cork somewhere along the production line, and then reacts with the wine. Some speculate that the chemical is left over from excessive pesticides use by cork farmers in the 1960s and 1970s; others say it is from sloppy use of chlorine "washes" to disinfect the corks before they are shipped to bottlers; another theory has the source as a byproduct of a fungus found in cork bark. In any case, trace TCA is a common environmental pollutant not limited to cork, but that's where it's creating the biggest problems.

A rather vocal segment of the wine connoisseur crowd insists that natural cork wine stoppers tainted with TCA are responsible for anywhere from two percent to ten percent of all wine bottles being spoiled. Winemakers lose money every year to cork taint; supermarkets also suffer when consumers return bad wine, or stop buying wine after a bad-cork experience. Consumers -- most of whom don't bother returning a corked bottle to a retailer or a vintner -- also certainly lose. So, too, do natural cork manufacturers who, in at least one case, have been sued for spoilage caused by cork taint.

Some winemakers and wine experts say the only solution to the problem is to phase out natural cork, and replace it with synthetic bottle stoppers made of plastic or even screwcaps (like the one on that bottle of cheapo white zinfandel in your fridge). The eccentric Bonny Doon boutique winery near Santa Cruz, Calif. now plugs every single one of its bottles with synthetic corks. Just last year a major Napa Valley winemaker, PlumpJack Vineyards (co-owned by billionaire Gordon Getty and San Francisco Supervisor Gavin Newsom) sealed its entire 1997 vintage Cabernet Sauvignon ($135 a bottle) with metal screwtops. Dozens of wineries in Australia and new Zealand quickly followed suit.

The creeping acceptance of plastic corks, however, is more than a matter of wine quality; it may spell the end for several endangered species of animals, as well as an ancient way of life in Spain and Portugal, where most cork is grown.

Cork oak forests on the Iberian peninsula constitute some of the very last remaining habitat of the endangered Iberian lynx and Imperial eagle. Led by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the UK, the pro-cork environmental faction claims that if plastic corks gain much of a foothold in the market -- and at this rate it seems inevitable that they will -- the price of natural cork will plummet and the cork oak forests will fall into disuse, and likely be replaced with less ecologically sound timber plantations, such as pine or eucalyptus, or by housing developments and theme parks.