Whilst in the midst of the latest flurry of press activity following French closure manufacturer Oeneo Bouchage’s research into the ‘greenness’ of different closures (Oeneo manufactures both the DIAM technical cork and screwcaps), it would be prudent to disclose that I travelled to Portugal in June to see and talk cork.  Thing is, whilst my hosts are nice people and all, their production facilities utterly impressive, and the cork landscapes every bit as charming as I had imagined, I am still known to delight in more than the occasional screwcap.

I’ve always liked natural cork, in the same way as I like (and I purposely employ the banal ‘like’ here) avocadoes, turquoise, and pilates - all the while being entertained no end by the fascist antics of fellow wine scribes on the issue. Also, my best efforts at drinking as much as my budget and liver allow in spite, I never, mysteriously, could accumulate the anecdotal evidence of cork taint they base much of their case and many a vulgar headline on. Frankly, I don’t quite get why everybody’s so angry! Nor why the debate has always raged on such absolutist terms. (Though it has been politely suggested I may be too young to remember the dark days of cork, as produced – and communicated -- by a generation now defunct.)

Anyway, my most recent observation is arguably not the most exciting of conclusions and somewhat of a departure from the close-with-what-the-hell-you-like (and-don’t-believe-everything-you-read!) stance of past editorials: The choice about what to close with is no longer one of mere personal preference.

Bandwagons and (other) blunders

As a newcomer to the local wine writing fold a few years back, no message was as effectively conveyed to me by the crowd I was courting - through an array of tacit signals - as the political incorrectness of my hopelessly post-modernist, very generation Y-ish, and ultimately way too civilised take on the closure debate.

In a stunning swing in popular opinion – measured at least in news and editorial column inches of late - natural cork is considered a worthy closure for wine again and the fat lady called Chemistry has yet to sing. That is, the jury is still out on OTR (oxygen transmission rate) and the post-bottling development of wine. Or so says wine chemists like Drs Jamie Goode and Brian Croser.[1]

Our industry’s foremost commentator – and one that has often fervently promoted the closure divide, writes in June, ‘It seems as if finally the tide may be turning.’[2] Recent coverage in various other publications has incrementally added to a subtle shift in sentiment – suggesting the tide is indeed turning, but not necessarily in the direction Mr Fridjhon indicates.

Other authorities may also, in hindsight, have been a tad premature in their prophesising of the screwcap’s all-conquering rise. The Daily Mail laid a charge of ‘packing and environmental offences’ against Kiwi wine closed with screwcaps earlier this year and shortly after Keith Stewart committed high treason by implicating screwcap liners in breast and prostate cancer. The severest of blows to the screwcap’s cause – from a wine industry insider’s point of view -- would have been the erroneous science concerning post-bottling wine chemistry the screwcap movement initially – and audaciously – used to validate their claims as to the superiority of the seal. With the advent of Green, some of the utterances made from the screwcap podium could now well be deemed as passé and cringe-inducing as the once swanky mock crayfish entreé, served anytime after 1985 anywhere other than matric farewells.

Political correctness, let us all be warned, is as fluid a thing as wine.

The wisdom and restraint of Brian Croser, quoted in a recent Harpers, offer some respite: ‘The pro-Stelvin movement is such an evangelistic movement – so disparaging, brutal and unintellectual. The industry has a tendency to get on a bandwagon. I resent that.’

Good old South African pragmatism (or procrastination I think some would prefer) may also have served our own industry well. Had we embraced the screwcap as zealously as many local proponents with access to editorial column space urged us to, we may have found ourselves only slightly less embattled than our archetypally more bold and pioneering Antipodean competitors currently are. [3]

I am, of course, not implying we are anywhere near the demise of the screwcap, nor am I advocating for it. I do believe though, to paraphrase Mark Twain, news of the natural cork’s death has been greatly exaggerated – and, sadly, often by irresponsible journalism (though ‘journalism’ may be too flattering a term to use interchangeably with ‘wine writing’).

Today’s revolution, tomorrow’s bandwagon

‘Customers care more than ever how products are made.’

So says Stuart Rose, CEO of Marks & Spencer, who recently commissioned a YouGov survey that found 59% of consumers sampled have avoided buying a food product due to concerns over where it had come from or under what conditions it had been made; while 78% said they would like to know more about the way products are made including the conditions in the factories where they come from and the use of chemicals in their manufacture.

British retailers, whatever else they may be accused of, do have the proverbial finger on the pulse of the reigning collective mood of their customers.

Richard Dawkins’s ‘changing moral zeitgeist’ is vividly manifested in the UK’s grocers’ seizing of the good-and-green platform (good, as in ethical), if in a context entirely unintended by the author. Commitments and pledges toward sustainable development, ethical trade, the combating of climate change, waste reduction, energy efficiency, recycling, respect for the environment and more of the same are now part and parcel of standard corporate policy – and more important, corporate personality.

The bravado of especially Tesco’s initial stance on screwcap conversion, a move once likened to training people to consume wine as if it were a can of baked beans, is likely to be somewhat muted in this new age of Green. Even then, as far as consumer goods and environmental impact go, a bottle of wine – even one closed with a screwcap -- is obviously a whole lot greener than laundry detergents, disposable nappies, or say, an SUV. Mr Fridjhon makes the point assertively in the article referred to above, saying he’d expect households concerned with the screwcap’s eco-friendliness relative to cork’s to also reconsider their consumption of aluminium foil, plastic supermarket bags and incandescent light bulbs.

They may still do.[4]

How exactly notions of greenness are going to affect wine closures specifically is yet to be seen.  In the meantime, the good old cork may have the spirit of the times on its side.

In Oregon in the US, Willamette Valley Vineyards recently went public with its claim to be ‘the first winery in the world to use cork stoppers harvested from responsibly managed forestlands certified by the Rainforest Alliance to Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards’. (Both the Alliance and the Council’s emblems are displayed on the back labels.)

Wouldn’t the staunchest of screwcap supporters concede that the term ‘Rainforest Alliance’ - and all the images, issues and associations it calls to mind - is infinitely better positioned than, perhaps, ‘The Association of Environmentally Sensitive Bauxite Miners’ to capture latter-day consumers’ imaginations through current language and shared concerns?

Cork has a story, a place and that all-important feel-good factor pursued with such angst by contemporary consumers, all likely to outlive ‘the dictatorship of the short-term’, as I overheard someone say recently referring to all that’s wrong with modern society. (The phrase, I later realised, has an uncannily apt application when juxtaposing aluminium’s finite reserves versus cork’s claim to be a perennially renewable resource – pun intended.)

Contradictions come standard

The wine industry is not that pristinely green, it should be noted. Vineyards may actually retain carbon by virtue of being green and leafy, but one has to also consider agricultural sprawl, tank farms and cellars gleaming of stainless steel, the vast amount in litres of water it consumes and in the absence of recycling, the wastage in packaging, to name but a few of its more impactful of impacts.

Dr Alan Limmer – who believes ‘the adoption of the screwcap has been a positive step for the [New Zealand] industry’ – writes in April this year, ‘The Clean Green New Zealand wine industry has spent the last 5-6 years chiding probably the most eco-friendly packaging we have.’

The closure debate is fraught with contradictions and ambiguity, arguably on both sides. It should, therefore, not harbour fanaticism, intellectual cowardice or half-hearted journalism.

The new Green is a little grey

What constitutes green, in a wine closures context, is increasingly difficult to make sense of. In New Zealand and Australia especially, screwcap proponents are contesting cork’s claims to be a vastly superior choice in terms of environmental impact.

Of course some still preach the evil that is TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) and insists upon its omnipresence, spoiling the numerous (and always anecdotal) consumption experiences they recall with such wrath (and thus nullifying any saving in carbon impact because of wastage, they are quick to add).

The most recent statistics in this regard to which an institution has put its name are those released by the International Wine Challenge (IWC) last year: 2.2% of wines tested had ‘high sulphide faults relating to screwcaps’ and 2.8% of wines were TCA-spoiled because of cork (a further 1.4% of wines showed oxidative characters due to cork, according to the IWC). Tesco is on record in a recent Off Licence News, claiming 3% of wine complaints received are attributed to cork taint (down 5% in 6 years). [5]

Let’s assume, at the very least for argument’s sake, that choosing a closure is not so much an issue of its propensity for TCA spoilage anymore.

All things being equal then, is the aluminium-and-polyvinylidene chloride screwcap a choice wholly reconcilable with a green conscience?

Rod Easthope of Craggy Range in New Zealand and formerly of Rustenberg and Backsberg, comments at Decanter.com: ‘…One must also remember that ‘quality’ cork plus a capsule costs ($) significantly more than screwcaps. Therefore, offsetting any (debatable) emissions increase due to their use, could be easily achieved by spending the saving on carbon credits and/or directly on genuine carbon sequestration projects.’

Which is a sentiment evidently shared by our own Backsberg and Graham Beck, respectively a member and champion of the Biodiversity and Wine Initiative (BWI).

Backsberg’s communication in regard to its status as South Africa’s first accredited producer of carbon neutral wines speaks of a ‘package’ of carbon sequestration solutions involving tree planting (under the auspices of Food and Trees for Africa), but also, potentially, ‘conversion to bio fuel, setting aside land for development of additional biomass, reviewing packaging (especially in terms of glass weight) and the development of methane digester technology’. The estate has a number of wines under screwcap, including top-end reds.

Graham Beck Wines just released their first ever screwcapped wine – a Pinotage Rosé 2007. With 1885 Ha of farmland committed to conservation, is it really that big a deal?

The intricacies of carbon footprint calculation make any clear-cut answer elusive indeed.

Carbon footprint, if you don’t yet know, is the total amount of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, emitted over the full life cycle of a product or service. It is expressed as grams of CO₂ equivalents, which accounts for the different global warming effects of different greenhouse gases.[6]

The common cheeseburger, it should be noted, contributes 2.85 to 3.1kg of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. (No typo here I’m afraid.) Compared to Oeneo’s figures for screwcaps – 10 633kg CO²/tonne – and natural cork’s 2 490kg CO²/tonne, one may be tempted to disregard the entire debate as utterly trivial and not really consequential in a bigger-picture kind of way. The world clearly has more important problems to solve, starting with making cheeseburgers more environmentally friendly.

You may want to reconsider your support of Steers then, rather than of Stelvin, and with much merit. This, however, does not undo what natural cork has got going for itself.

Consider the following, in an effort to illuminate the methodological mechanics consistently at play when comparing cork and its metal-made substitute in an environmental context.

Screwcaps, generically, are 100% recyclable. [7] And Tesco aims to have all its packaging recyclable (or compostable) by end 2010, with an important proviso: ‘unless this increases the [product’s] carbon footprint’.

Exactly how the recycling of the screwcap is likely to add to the product’s environmental impact is yet to be determined or disclosed, though I understand from local manufacturers, in broad terms, recycling the seals would see them returned to an aluminium smelter and shipped to ‘Japan’ as compressed scrap metal – to be smelted (again) for use in the manufacturing of other metal consumables.

Natural cork is certainly not being recycled on a scale worth boasting about, though the seal is, by virtue of its very naturalness, 100% biodegradable and thus does not demand the same energy expenditure in disposing thereof. A cork stopper would, in the absence of a recycled incarnation, release carbon into the atmosphere by decomposing. Though if it was recycled, converting the closure into something else (flooring or soundproofing material, for instance), would by the nature of cork manufacturing itself (much of the production process is fuelled by cork dust or biomass, as it would be called in this instance), ask far less of the environment than metal smelting, among other things.

With a consumer hat on and now that I’ve experienced the cork groves, the grotesque contrast between that serenest of scenes and the nondescript earth-wound that is an aluminium mine - based only on visual criteria and the associations it evokes – I know what makes me feel good. And if I’ve only ever grasped one thing, feeling good is what consumerism is all about. What’s more, the hedonistic notion implied therein is increasingly downplayed in favour of more responsible consumption, with the entire Western World on record that its culture's premium placed on the individual is not serving society as it should.

My understanding and indeed contention is that the most successful of commercial players in this day and age will be those who connect the dots between feeling good and doing good.

From feelings to facts

Cork is hand-harvested tree bark, and trees are the earth’s most precious partners in fighting the effects of global warming. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and, through the photosynthesis process, convert that to carbohydrates which they then grow on, while releasing oxygen back into the atmosphere. Carbon, it follows, is banked away for as long as the tree is alive. As soon as any part of the tree dies and rots, or is burned, the carbon required to build that bit of tree is released back into the atmosphere.

Trees thus retain or store carbon and are often collectively referred to as ‘carbon sinks’. In fact, the world’s forest ecosystems store more carbon than the entire atmosphere. (Cork forests span a total of 2.2m Ha in the world.)[8] It is this capability for actual carbon retention that perhaps most definitively differentiates a natural cork wine stopper from an aluminium screwcap in the environmental context.

Amorim estimates one natural cork unit to sequester 8.8g of carbon and the CO2-retention capabilities of Portugal’s cork forests alone - at 732 000 Ha - at 4.8m tonnes per year, or 5% of the country’s total annual emissions.[9]

(You may recall that this figure -- 8.8g of sequestered CO² per unit -- differs vastly from Oeneo’s quoted earlier, reason being the different methodologies used by the two entities. Oeneo’s Dean Banister is quoted on JancisRobison.com as saying their research takes into account the production process of the closures, including energy source, recycled material, employees' travel, and more, but that it does not include ‘the positive aspects of the cork forest’. Barrister told Julia Harding MW the cork groves’ contribution to the carbon impact calculation ‘is impossible to quantify’. The actual report does, however, conclude: ‘… favouring cork as a primary material helps to maintain cork-oak plantations which are a carbon sink. Although no precise figures have been put on this sink in the context of this study and hence they have not been incorporated quantitatively into the footprint, this is a plus which should not be forgotten.’)

Would the Mediterranean cork forests still be sinking carbon on our behalf even in the absence of a cork wine stopper industry?(Wine stoppers account for 70% of global cork production.)

Arguably, as cork trees are devoid of any actual maintenance or nurturing of any kind, other than being harvested (no herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers or irrigation is used). The forests may in all probability contentedly outlive the estimated 60 000 jobs they provide or 100 000 humans they economically sustain.

Mr Fridjhon, in the article referred to earlier, has in fact suggested that wine consumers the world over would be served well should the European Union declare the cork forests under its jurisdiction a national park. If this is your sentiment, and assuming unemployment and urbanisation with all its wretched consequences don’t concern you or the EU, you may want to consider this most devastating of poignancies: Cork trees actually retain 3-4 times as much carbon than ‘ordinary’ trees by virtue of regenerating themselves at the hands of the humans who harvest them, for the first time at the age of 25 and thereafter at 9 year intervals. The tree’s life span is in effect enhanced by its symbiosis with humanity, and its commercial utility.

Cork’s plight, I believe to have just illustrated, is not so much about tree-hugging (how apt a term in this context!) and lynx-loving, nor is it a publicity stunt as some conspiracy theorists would have us believe. But most of all, the issue at hand is not as simple as converting to the screwcap and declaring the cork groves a peace park.

Have I mentioned choosing a wine closure is not so much about TCA and personal preference anymore?

The WWF insists that for cork forests to retain their current footprint and scale – with all its consequent environmental benefits – they have to maintain their economic value. (You may want to reflect for a moment on your support of the Biodiversity and Wine Initiative – who shares this conservation-meets-commercialism tenet - before dismissing the WWF’s official line as ‘rehashed cork propaganda’.)[10] Far from being a covert attempt at self-preservation by the cork industry as some screwcap proponents have alluded, fire and desertification, the WWF contends, are real, potentially significant threats; and the human inhabitants of the forests its only - and literal - line of defence. ‘People have to care for the forests,’ as Paolo Lombardi from the WWF’s Mediterranean unit maintains.[11]

Of glass and cork

Much has been made recently of the environmental impact of glass and natural cork has been implicated in a wine bottles context. It has been suggested cork has something to answer for as the closure of choice when bottling with heavy-weight glass.

The UK government’s Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) launched its GlassRite Wine project in 2006 ‘to encourage lightweighting of wine bottles sold through the UK off-trade, and to encourage more wine importers, brand owners and retailers to bulk import wine and then bottle it in lighter glass bottles manufactured in the UK’. According to WRAP, reducing the weight of all glass bottles consumed in the UK to the lightest available would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 90 000 tonnes.

Suppose then, hypothetically, WRAP replaces the 1 billion wine bottles consumed in the UK annually with light-weight versions (and save 90 000 tonnes of carbon), and suppose furthermore all of those are closed with screwcaps: At 52.3g of carbon dioxide emissions per screwcap unit[12], such a scenario would contribute an additional 52 300 tonnes of CO2, thus diminishing the 90 000 tonnes saved by the same number.

For argument’s sake then, and in the interests only of being thorough, one billion light-weight bottles sealed with natural cork at a footprint per unit of 11.9g would save 40 400 tonnes of carbon. Coupled with the 90 000 tonnes saved by converting to light-weight glass, the total saving in this scenario amounts to 130 400 tonnes.[13](I have stuck with Oeneo's figures, for concluding the argument here, which do not include the cork forests carbon sinking credentials in the eventual footprint.)

Can the UK wine trade assume both the green stance and champion the screwcap simultaneously? Sustainably? With integrity? Time will tell.

At a footprint of 183.3g CO²/bottle – as per Oeneo’s study – what is certain is that glass is a more urgent environmental concern than closures of any kind.

(On the issue of capsules, Oneo’s research – estimating the carbon footprints of natural cork, DIAM and the screwcap at 2 490kg/t, 4 253kg/t and 10 633kg/t respectively – did take into account the packaging norm of an additional PVC neck sleeve on wine bottles sealed with a natural or technical cork. I couldn’t as yet extract figures in this regard from the cork industry and don’t know how the capsule’s individual carbon contribution would affect natural cork’s sequestration ‘performance’, if at all. Though revisiting the capsule in the green context and with a view to a marketing message, could very well be appropriate and opportune.)[14]

Murky methodology

Mr Fridjhon in the said article rightfully demands that the carbon footprint ‘of shipping Portuguese corks around the world compared with producing Stelvin closures in many of the wine-exporting countries’ be considered.

Maritime transport, as far as transport goes, is considered a ‘lower-pollutant’ option[15] and very obviously a much less energy intensive and environmentally harsh activity than the act of aluminium ore extraction. Ships also freight medicines, food, spare parts, appliances and an infinitely long list of other consumer goods and essentials, including the very thing participants in the closure debate are economically dependent on: wine.

We’re right back where we started, you see: Carbon footprint (or ‘food mile’) methodology is utterly complex. And best not braved from an either-or vantage point. As carbon neutral Grove Mill winery’s Dave Pearce says in a recent Wine Spectator: ‘If you really wanted to save the planet, the answer is easy: Don’t drink any wine. But, given that many people would rather drink wine … then the conscience-minimizing strategy would be to drink wine that had consumed minimum energy in storage, packaging and transport.’

It should be clear that the answer to what’s good for the environment will not emerge truthfully when sought from a preconceived base. And that goes for natural cork too. What I can offer to help you make sense of it all in the interim is this: It’s less about where the stuff is produced and more about how.

Environmental scientists, I gather, refer to this axiom as ‘production balance’. At the heart of the concept lies the balance struck between carbon emissions produced and carbon emissions retained by a product and its manufacturing process. Faced with the fickleness of public opinion and having said that wine closures’ environmental impact shouldn’t – by its insignificant nature relative to other consumables – occupy us too intensely or for too long, the fact remains: Natural cork has an incontestable advantage over the screwcap in this regard.

Okay then, but is cork good for wine?
Should we choose cork as producers and insist on it as consumers driven exclusively by environmental altruism?[16]

Well, no. Not for the moment at least.

TCA, the cork industry maintains and the IWC’s 2006 results prove, is a problem tentatively solved, to the extent that a substance of its nature can be solved.

One of my more epiphaneous moments in a closures context was realising TCA is not as faceless and ethereal as is so often implied. Nor is cork bark its inherent, primordial and exclusive habitat. The malice manifesting as ‘mousy’ in your glass is a derivative of the pesticide trichlorophenol – once used everywhere but cork groves, ironically -- and therefore, actually, a man-made substance and problem.

‘TCA can’t be eradicated, for similar reasons as a virus can’t be quarantined or being struck by lightning can’t be foretold,’ the cork people tell me, which seems a sensible statement. Only sensibility is so often not at play when wine people are confronted by the foul-smelling sign of its tell-tale presence.

Isn’t it funny (and not in a hah-hah way) how our reactions to a carton of off milk, a bottle of fermented juice or a packet of miete-infested oats aren’t governed by the same psychology as our experience of cork taint is. It’s obvious the wine consumption experience is one vastly different and much more psychologically loaded than say, drinking milk is. Wine is all about the context within which it is consumed, the egos involved and the social dynamics at play; milk is an incidental – something you have with coffee or cereal, or at its most noble, a way to up your calcium intake. My point is, notwithstanding the strides made in minimising TCA in recent years, wine is not milk.[17]

Moving on from TCA, consider New Zealander Paul White’s observation in regard to the widespread use of copper fining to neutralise post-bottling sulphide reduction in screwcapped wines: ‘Where most people want fewer chemicals in their food and drink these days, screwcap advocates are stepping in with more.’(Harpers, December 2006)

As I’ve mentioned before, the jury is still out on the matter of oxygen transmission rate and post-bottling sulphide reduction. And if you’ve been told differently, even by institutions and opinion leaders otherwise held in high regard, don’t go on record before immersing yourself in the chemistry and journalism of, respectively, Dr Alan Limmer and the said Paul White.

The last word isn’t mine. Dr Jamie Goode concludes in a Harpers article in December 2006: ‘…the possibility remains that there’s something special about the way cork permits post-bottling development of wines that can’t be replicated by alternative closures.’

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FOOTNOTES: