How cork is made
wineanorak.com
wineanorak.com
We harvest the cork out of the trees every ten years but it's absolutely false that the owners of these trees make lots of money like someone here has said in another comment. We just get enough to keep the forest clean of underbrushes. This is a real truth.
Moreover, because his area is very dry in summer we suffer fires that burn the forests every decade or two. Fortunately the burnt cork still works as an insulator, it's black on the outside and therefore can only be used as insulators in buildings. Amazingly, because cork it's such a great insulator burned cork trees survive the fires and develop very easily. You've mostly lost the cork production though...
We had a great fire at the beginning of the past summer that could be even smelt from Barcelona (180Km away from this forest). I have a couple of interesting pictures of the cork trees and how they develop.
This is a picture taken right after the great fire: http://goo.gl/3oM8O
Three months later all trees are developing again, however cork needs to be peeled. We actually lost three years of bark growth because the last harvest was three years ago: http://goo.gl/3ZBHl
So I think it's a bit of a shame that it's used for wine bottle corks and usually thrown away after use!
"It takes at least 20 years for a tree to mature so it can be harvested"
If cork demand doubles tomorrow it means you will have to plant new trees and it will take at least 20 years before those trees are mature enough to be harvested.
A tree reaches maturity after ~25 years after planting, and the first harvest is usually low quality, so it doesn't bring money. After the first harvest it can be harvested every 9-10 years, and you can do so for hundred of years (a healthy cork oak can live for 5-600 years).
Cork does grow on trees, but slowly :).
Wines that are meant to drink while young do great with a screw cap. Anything that I'd want to put in a cellar and age I'd want to have a natural cork.
The effects of micro-oxidization are definitely not the only change in taste that happen to an aging wine.
"Better" is a subjective term, and most people would actually prefer the fruitiness of a youthful wine. Heck, I know I do most of the time :) But there's something that develops with certain wines over time that I'm not just convinced that you can get with screw caps.
Maybe it's even part of some wine/wood interaction
Screw caps may be ok but they certainly look cheap.
I'm not convinced low-end corks are better than synthetic cork (in the case of some aging), and maybe the technology improves, leaving the solid corks to the expensive wines.
Supermarkets in France sell corks, I remember seeing them split by aging time, from 1,2 years up to around 20 years
People told them they were crazy, that the market thought screw tops were for cheap junk wine only, but they did it. And it worked. Now only bottles going to export markets use corks.
You lose the ritual of uncorking a bottle, but it's a lot more practical to open and there is no danger of the wine being corked.
I've learned a lot about FRP construction and I've never heard of cork used as a core matarial. Are you sure you're not thinking of Balsa?
Balsa is a hardwood despite being so light, so it has capillaries in it. The wood is cut into blocks and then the end-grain is pressed into the wetted-out FRP mat. The resin in the mat is drawn into the balsa through capillary action forming a very secure bond.
Manufactured foam core material doesn't have capillaries and therefore has trouble forming a bond with the resin. If you're using foam instead of balsa core, the manufacturer will specify a bonding agent that you need to use between the mat and the core.
If cork were to be used as a core, I'd think it'd have the same problem bonding with the resin as foam has, and you'd have to use a special bonding agent formulated for the cork.
EDIT: Heh, after posting I decided to google around for cork FRP core. It turns out there is a company selling a core material manufactured from cork: http://www.mcmc-uk.com/products-corecork.html; most of the users of it I can find are surfboard builders though. Here's a not-very-long thread about it on boatdesign.net: http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/materials/corecork-material...
Thank you for sharing!
I know it's a community decision, but there's communities for this already.
For me a big part of the hacker mindset is wanting to understand how anything(!) works. How the things we use every day function in the deepest sense, how they are created, why they exist. This post explains everything about Cork in great detail and I loved learning all that. I hope that HN will always value posts like this highly.
I just come from an "on-topic" background, I guess.
> Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.
Ah, so it's true about the cork soakers.
For the uninformed.
Incase you don't want to read the script.
Wine is often a social experience - so there is something too be said for the "fun" and flash of popping open a cork.
In a similar note, we have a "rabbit" corkscrew. It's super efficient at opening a bottle, but is not particularly satisfying. Have you ever asked yourself, If only I could open this bottle faster? (Although it can be convenient if you're cooking with wine.)
I bet that, once you get used to it (after spoling a few hundreds of corks, that's it) it's faster than the "rabbit" model.
I say that because I used to be faster with the simple, T-shaped screw, and I've seen it used in restaurants by experienced waiters.
For wines that lose their primary characteristic when aged (think fruity, fresh wines, normally whites) a screw top is the way to go, for something you want to keep in your cellar and let it evolve a bit till is just right, I'll take cork every day.
As a sidenote, cork was one of the main components of the Space Shuttle's insulation (http://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/03/science/shuttle-s-cork-fro...) [and yes, I'm from Portugal, you can all blame us for the Columbia...]
Overall, a screw-cap is a way better option, one of the biggest wine vendors in France (Chateau Bonnet from the famous André Lurton) switched to caps some years ago after extensive research and also prefers them above traditional cork for all wines. Furthermore see [2], they list the following advantages:
- No cork taint
- No more sporadic oxidation
- Screwcaps avoid flavour modification, including scalping
- Both red and white wines can age under screwcap
- A reliable long-term seal
- Cellaring
- Recycling
[1] http://www.mutineermagazine.com/blog/2008/05/screw-this-cap-...
[2] http://www.screwcapinitiative.com/normal.asp?navID=24&pa...
Theoretically cork taint is mostly avoidable as long as the wines aren't stored in buildings made from wood or that have wood floors, and as long as there isn't air conditioning. The reason for cork taint is that the chlorine that's used in cleaning products and that comes out of air conditioners (running on chlorinated city water) builds up in wood over time, and then reacts with the mold in cork to form TCA. The other problem is that the vast majority of cork is stored on the ground and is just left to get moldy with zero quality standards, despite what this article would have you believe. Cork taint should be essentially non-existant up until the time of purchase, it's just that the industry has been completely unable to get its act together.
Very curious - thanks for the insight, esp on the cleaning products!
I absolutely love this one (especially around 3:30 onward) due to how tremendously satisfying the sounds and visuals are.
I'm surprised that with top-quality corks being so valuable, there isn't an incentive to recycle the material. I also wonder if there is a collector's market for vintage corks.
* The cork bark grows back every five to seven years.
* The initial bark strippings aren't of a high-enough
quality for bottles. IIRC, it takes four or five harvests
to get to that point.Why don't more old world wineries go to the twist top?
I guess we are more or less poisoned day by day seeing yet another location-based-social-video-sharing-mobile-analytics -app.
There are plenty of reasons to replace workers with robots, but "making those workers happier" is not one of them...
"Hey Martha, we've noticed that you don't seem to find your job to be very enjoyable. Well good news, we've fired you!"
....
Segragation was just a reality and anyone who suggested that there could be a better way was "living in a fantasy world."
Much the same was said about those who advocated for the downfall of Apartheid in South Africa. Most foreign policy experts were blindsighted by the swift and mostly bloodless downfall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s.
I could go on giving example after example from history, where what was once the status quo (and was even seen as the natural order of things) was radically changed in a relatively brief period to a state hardly imagined as possible by people living just decades earlier. Not only are such events plentiful in history, the rate at which such events are happening seems to be only increasing.
The only thing certain about the future is that it's full of surprises. And the world is what we make it.
Or maybe the counter argument is, "Well, they look happy in the pictures."
Or is it, "They'd be even less happy without a job"?
Except that no one's disputing these latter two arguments. Yes, they might be even more miserable without a job, but that doesn't mean their present job isn't depressing. And the apparent happiness in pictures cherry-picked by some PR hack for the wine industry is proof of nothing.
I would not use the adjective "depressing" to qualify human labour that respects the environment it is set in, helps populations keep living in interior mediterranean areas, and to speak about the product; help make something that has a wide field of application. In fact these zones benefit from a lot of quality rural turism because of the loop feed that comes out of grape, cork, rural area setting with life quality parameters that are disappearing all around the world. These are strong people that shouldn't be paternalized for their strong value system that preserves habitat and social condition in a strong group pattern. But that is just my opinion based on the contact I have with this sort of cultural setting. All of these things make this specialized manual labour part of a culture that warrants preservation, not arbitrary value imposition.
I'm willing to go out on a limb to imagine they could have more interesting and more fulfilling jobs than that, and even that those jobs need not be environmentally destructive -- they might be environmentally beneficial, even. Is this such a stretch? Would that be so wrong?
Is it inconceivable that some of these people might not actually enjoy spending all their work hours sorting or boiling cork? Just because they and perhaps their ancestors have been doing this for a long time, does that mean that they enjoy it or would not rather be doing something else with their time?
Speaking of imposing values, perhaps these workers should actually be asked about what they want to do and whether they want their lives and their children's lives to be dedicated to sorting cork.
Prior to getting into university I worked fulltime at a green-bean processing plant. Green-beans come in on a truck, straight from a harvester, and leave on another truck cut and washed. Exposed to the elements (roof, but no walls) in deafening noise, standing in front of a conveyor belt for hours staring at green beans trying to grab all the dead field animals, sticks, and stems before they went into the cutting machine. The beans were soaking wet so my hands were constantly freezing. On good days they threw me a rake and told me to climb into the back of a tractor trailer. After a while that gave me RSI.
It was I suspect worse than cork sorting or soaking. Certainly comparable.
Did I enjoy this job? Hell no. Would I rather have been doing something else? No shit. Would I, even in retrospect, want myself forced out of that job at that time? Fuck no. Would I ever think of going back there and suggesting that all those other workers be replaced to improve their lives? You have got to be fucking kidding me.
I am not advocating firing anyone. If someone enjoys sorting cork, or if they are just too afraid to make a transition to more interesting and fulfilling work, I'd have no problem with them staying on.
What I do advocate is actually asking these people if they want to stay on or be trained to do more interesting and fulfilling work. For those who do choose to do something else, I think it would be a good thing to make this option available to them, especially when the same job could be done by machines.
That you think life is so simple really highlights your privilege.