Cork – the millennium bug

I’m up north this week presenting my 50 Great Portuguese Wines, yesterday in Manchester, tomorrow in Edinburgh.  It’s a chance to catch up with not just the wines, but also some of Portugal’s finest producers, who are over to support the event.  So far so good, with some great feedback on the wines.  

Usually, I find Portuguese producers are intensely patriotic about cork – not many screwcapped wines in Portugal!  So I was interested to hear from Pedro Araújo of Quinta do Ameal and Luis Lourenço of Quinta dos Roques that, around 1999/2000, they had major issues with cork taint.  This coincides with the period that many Australian producers experienced a nadir with cork, soon afterwards abandoning it in droves in favour of screwcap.  

I don’t think I was alone in thinking that perhaps Australia (and other New World countries) got a raw deal because they joined the cork queue relatively late in the day.  Clearly not so, though that’ll be scant consolation to producers who play russian roulette every time they delve into their museum releases.  The good news is that Araújo and Luís Lourenço report that the quality of cork has since much improved and, in this, they acknowledge that the success of screwcaps has indirectly been a good thing.