From a Mighty Oak

Chances are you’ve held a bottle stopper made from Portuguese cork. Portugal produces 40 million wine stoppers each day and proudly boasts half of the world’s production of all cork products.

Cork is a natural material, specifically the bark of a type of oak tree (Quercus Suber L.) with evergreen leaves. This amazing tree has an average lifespan of around 270 to 300 years and is known for its prodigious capacity for regeneration. After swaths of Portugal was burned in the October 2017 fires, the cork oaks largely bounced back, sprouting new leaves the following spring. Portugal hosts the oldest cork oak tree in the world.

The world's largest and oldest cork tree is known as the Whistler Cork for the birds singing in its expansive branches.

The first instances of cork usage spans millennia. Before 3000 BCE, Egypt, Babylon, and Persia were already using cork in fishing tackle. Cork from Portugal has been used to make badminton shuttlecocks, bulletin boards, flooring, insulation, NASA heatshields, purses, hats, and vegan “leather” for shoes, yoga mats, and yoga blocks.

Cork is extremely light, elastic, and compressible, highly resistant to abrasion, fire retardant, impermeable to liquids and gases and has excellent thermal and acoustic insulation qualities

Cork trees have been a protected species here since 1209 to maintain its sustainability. The bark is harvested every 9 years throughout a tree’s lifetime, with no damage to the trees. The number you may see painted on a tree trunk indicates the year it was harvested.

The "2" in the first image represents 2022, the most recent harvest. Tim stands by an older oak tree boasting several cork bark harvests.

Cork forests are a long-term investment. As the saying goes in Portugal, you plant them for your grandchildren. A cork oak tree will only be ready for its first harvest 25 years after being planted. The first and second harvests will produce cork that’s not good enough to be used as bottle stoppers – that material will instead be ground up and used to make several different products, from fashion items, to building materials or fishing products, so there is no waste.

Next time you open a bottle of wine, remember that the bottle stopper you’re holding in your hand comes from a tree that is at least 43 years old and may be older than you!

Tiradores (cork strippers) work in pairs, using handheld axes to harvest cork bark from May through September. They first make cuts at both the top and bottom of the tree trunk and then peel the cork off in large chunks. Learn more about harvesting cork.

Flexible and lightweight, cork can also be used in a series of everyday accessories such as mouse mats, woodwind instruments, inside baseballs, tennis and cricket balls, golf accessories, in furniture, kitchenware, toys, rugs, cork umbrellas, dresses, or in one of Garrett McNamara’s surfboards.

I have been collecting used wine corks to grind into a garden mulch to keep the soil cool and moist and to block out weeds. I will give an update on this experiment in a few months. Learn about making wine corks here.

At Home in Portugal

We are celebrating my official residency status. We cannot visit other European countries until after my residency card arrives, which could take several months. Our next step is getting our Portugal driver licenses. That could take 3 months or possibly over a year. Portugal is known for progressive social legislation but not for efficiency of bureaucracy.

I would cut these flowers and hand them to you with love -- if you were here!

Sunflower, dalhia, and ranuncluas.