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Cork Producers claim to have controlled the taint

After losing sales to synthetic stoppers and metal screw tops, cork producers now claim they have found a way to stem a decline in market share through a process that gets rid of "cork taint." The contaminant can render the finest vintage undrinkable and costs the wine industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year, reports International Herald Tribune.

Corticeira Amorim, the world's biggest maker of wine corks, saw sales decline each year from 2000 through 2004 as consumers turned up their noses at pinot noirs with the bouquet of a damp dog. Amorim responded by modernizing plants to cut production costs as he searched for a cure.

Amorim's process, which steams out compounds caused by a naturally occurring fungus, has helped lower the industrywide incidence of cork taint to less than 1 percent of wine bottles produced, from as much as 5 percent, said Sónia Baldeira, an analyst at Caixa Banco de Investimento in Lisbon..

Portugal produces 54 percent of the world's cork, or about 185,000 tons a year. Oeneo, a French rival that has developed its own taint-removal process, sniffs at Amorim's claim. Instead, Oeneo says that it has eliminated the problem caused by the chemical trichloroanisole, or TCA, once and for all.

Carlos de Jesús, the Corticeira Amorim spokesman, said that the Portuguese company's process is the only one that combines "preventive and curative measures."

Both cork makers are now turning their efforts to halting a slide in sales to wineries.

About 78 percent, or 14 billion, of the 18 billion wine "closures" each year are sealed with cork. "If you went back 10 years, you'd probably find that it was 95 percent cork,"

The race to find a way to produce a fungus-free natural cork stopper and one cheap enough to compete with alternatives has cost Corticeira Amorim about €6 million a year in research spending since 2000.

The effort paid off with a reduction in taint of as much as 90 percent and has led some wine producers in South Africa and Chile to start using cork again.

Complete report at www.iht.com

 

 

 
 
 

 
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