Skip to main content

To Cork or Not to Cork

I read a book review in the WSJ a few weeks ago. The book was about the cork industry. I'm not exactly a wine connoisseur, so I don't know much about the general industry. I do know that out of the many bottles of wine I've had, I've never come across a rotten cork. I was quite surprised to read the statistic about the percentage of wine bottles where the cork ruins the wine. Here's the excerpt:

For a couple of hundred years, winemakers and wine drinkers understood that the wine in a small percentage of bottles -- as much as 3% to 5% -- would suffer from the contamination of bad corks (and, sometimes, bad barrels). The culprit was a chemical called tricholoanisole, or TCA. It caused wine to become "corked" -- that is, to smell like a moldy pile of damp cardboard. The TCA problem -- apparently originating at the early stages of cork harvesting -- seemed to get worse over the past few decades. But the cork industry, dominated by a handful of big companies in Spain and Portugal, refused even to acknowledge the problem, let alone do anything about it.
The cork makers were in for a rude awakening. "To cork's critics, the failure rate is both outrageous and unacceptable," writes George Taber in "To Cork or Not to Cork." "They repeatedly argue that if 3% or 5% of Toyota cars or IBM computers failed, those companies would be out of business." So over the past decade, winemakers have taken matters into their own hands, exploring alternatives that include, lately, glass caps.

A 3 - 5% failure rate is really pretty high! Can you imagine buying a $200 bottle of wine just to discover that the bottle is ruined because of the cork? Apparently screw caps and plastic corks are not necessarily the answer either, though. Here's an excerpt about that:

Maybe, but screw caps and synthetic corks may cause problems of their own: They may do such a good job sealing the bottle that they kill the wine. One of the first to explore this problem was Paul White, a journalist and wine expert in New Zealand, who has been on a crusade against the screw-cap revolution. Mr. White argues that cork is essential to wine's aging process because it lets trace amounts of oxygen into the bottle. A perfectly sealed wine bottle with a screw cap can, over time, suffer from something called "reduction" -- causing it to smell like sulfur-infused rotten eggs. The idea that a small amount of oxygen is essential to the aging of wine may not be universally accepted, but it is not new. As Louis Pasteur put it more than 150 years ago: "It is oxygen that makes the wine." Mr. White's criticism of screw caps has made him something of a pariah in New Zealand, where the wine industry is so heavily invested in them.

Gosh. Didn't realize the whole process was so complex. Maybe we should just resort to sippy boxes?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Biofuels May Hinder Anitglobal-Warming Efforts

Read an interesting article a couple weeks back in the WSJ on how biofuels may actually increase carbon emissions in the medium to long-term. Apprently the shifts in land-use necessary to support the production of bio-materials like soybeans, corn, or palm could in fact release more carbon emissions. The time it takes to get carbon-neutral on some of these projects is pretty crazy - 319 years for soybean biodiesel from Brazil (assuming you're clearing rainforest), 93 years for corn ethanol from the U.S. (assuming you're clearing grasslands), 86 years for palm biodiesel from Indonesia (assuming you're clearing rainforest). I suppose biofuels really aren't meant to reduce carbon emissions, but just crazy that they potentially exacerbate the problem so much.
3 comments
Read more

Nine Prescriptions for Building the Duke Entrepreneurial Community

I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...
3 comments
Read more

Bloomberg for President?

We can only hope. I read an article in the WSJ about how business people across the country, from entrepreneurs to bankers, are all hoping for Bloomberg to run. The economy thus far seems to have taken an unusual backseat in this years election but seems to be emerging as an important issue. An interesting excerpt: As the economy has emerged as a dominant issue in the 2008 campaign, candidates have struck populist notes, from Republican Mike Huckabee's boast that he is not a "wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street" to Democrat Barack Obama's visit to Wall Street to chastise finance executives for failing to protect the middle class. I can see the approach these guys are taking and I'm sure they have really smart campaign strategists. But I really wonder if this type of message of polarizing the "working man" vs. "big business" really resonates with voters anymore? Is the middle-class really that disgruntled with big business and income dispa...
2 comments
Read more