Sunday, April 27, 2008
Food, Wine, Beer & Spirits
The unstoppable stopper
Sticking a cork in it
By Jason Tesauro and Phineas Mollod
Who knew there was 278 pages worth of stuff to say about cork? Say what you want, but George M. Taber, author of “To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science, and the Battle for the Wine Bottle” (Scribner, Oct. 2007) has turned tree bark into a real interesting yarn. Author of 2005’s vinous must-read, “Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine,” Taber was the sole journalist that attended the now-famous event that pitted a 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon and a 1973 Chateau Montelena Winery Chardonnay against the best French reds and whites. All serious winos, with or without highfalutin corkscrews at home, know that California won, but that’s old news.
In his latest book, Taber goes back to 6000 B.C., recounting the history of wine, its storage and transport. But in 1665, he ties cork’s rise to a bestselling book called “Micrographia” that Samuel Pepys himself called “the most ingenious book I ever read.” Once the wine cork’s 800 million tetrakaidecahedronal (that’s fourteen-sided for dopes who failed geometry) cells were discovered, quercus suber, or the cork oak tree, would be shoved in bottle necks unchallenged for nearly three centuries. It is these microscopic pockets of air that provides unequivocal buoyancy and the peerless compressibility that define, as Taber calls it, “nature’s nearly perfect product.”
The cork oak has two layers of bark. The inner layer is alive, but cork as we know it comes from the outer layer of the dead bark. It takes a decade to build up a thick enough layer for the cork to be harvested without harming the tree. Thus, a tree might yield a million corks or more during the course of its life, but there’s so much mass-produced plonk, it’s easy to see why there’s a shortage of good corks. John L. Mason, of jar fame, invented the first screwcap in 1858, and by the 1980s, Australia was perfecting it for wine. Yet the death of cork wasn’t because of these so-called “Stelvin enclosures,” it was more accurately due to a coup of the Portuguese fascist regime in 1974 that led to widespread political upheaval and a nationalization of cork production. The disorder, combined with increased global needs, drove the peasant industry further into the dark ages. Trees were harvested far sooner than nine or 10 years, corks were boiled in dirty water, washed with chlorine and left in contact with blankets of mold. Ewwwww.
Eventually, cork taint was tied to 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), a substance so aromatically potent, that “an average consumer will usually detect it at about 5 parts per trillion. Just one teaspoon of it is enough to taint the entire annual American wine production.” Taber recounts an analogy used by the Swiss scientists who first identified the compound: “… like putting two sugar cubes into nearby Lake Constance and having the water taste sweet.”
The second half of the book spells out the undoing of the cork monopoly and the rise of synthetic corks, screwcaps, glass stoppers, and all the other hare-brained ideas. And by the end, just when you’ve foresworn cork, field test after critical field test compares the same wine in a variety of enclosures…and guess who keeps winning? The good news, Taber tells us, is that the cork producers have reformed, and have practiced higher standards and restricted yields despite industry pressures.
Assiduously researched, and written with rousing narrative interplay of whodunit and which-side-are-you-on, “To Cork” is a lively read for curious drinkers or anyone who revels in the romantic pop of a perfectly pulled cork. Cork will never be the same, and you’ll wonder if your grandkids will someday laugh and say, “Remember when people used to shove tree bark in wine bottles? Barbarian, maybe, but have you got a better idea? SP
Phineas and Jason are the authors of “The Modern Gentleman” and “The Modern Lover.” E-mail them at booze@sundaypaper.com.