I once commented that HN is the most wonderfully diverse ecosystem and here's my chance to prove myself right! I'm a cork 'farmer' in Coruche, right where this article is situated. I wasn't expecting to read a puff piece about it today. I just did my novennial harvest last year. For anyone not in the know, cork is the cork trees' bark, and it's stripped from the tree without harming it every nine years. Undressing the tree is properly medieval work and you need to be very skilled with a hatchet to do it. Do a poor job and you'll ruin the cork and scar the tree for decades.
The harvest is tough work but it's the only well-paid trade left in agriculture. I doubt it has much future beyond fodder for high peasant magazine articles. Trees are dying left and right from multiple climate-related problems no one has a handle on. Divestment from the traditional montado like mine into intensive production units with better water management and automated extraction is the likely future. The billion-dollar outfits have started experiments with high-density groves, inspired by the olive oil industry's success. It's a finicky tree though, so conclusive results are taking a few decades more than you'd expect to materialise. They're stuck having to buy cork from thousands of traditionalist family farms for now.
But that's assuming the industry even grows enough to justify the investment into better plantations. Legitimate uses for the stuff apart from wine corks are scarce. We're all hoping that our phenomenal ecological footprint will see us grow as an industry into everything from insulation and roofing to shopping bags and umbrellas (hence said puff piece I imagine). We'll see, it really is a phenomenal material and the carbon math makes sense at the source. You can almost see the tree sucking out stuff from the air and soil to build thicker layers of bark. I joke that we've been doing regenerative farming for generations, we just didn't know it until someone told us.
If anyone on HN is ever in Portugal and wants to visit a montado, happy to take y'all on the most boring tour of your life. But we can have a nice picnic! It's lovely country.
This is interesting. I had always heard that removing a tree’s bark, even just a ring around the trunk, would kill it, as it could no longer get nutrients up to the rest of the tree.
Would it be correct to say the cork is a protective layer over the part of the tree that does that nutrient transport, and most trees don’t allow for this kind of separation? Or maybe the average person just isn’t knowledgeable and skilled enough to make the distinction when removing bark?
On a side note, I’m happy to see cork is harvested sustainably and Portugal has such long standing laws in place to protect it. Many years ago I heard wines were moving away from cork because the world was going to run out, and it seemed like plastic and synthetic cork was becoming more popular in cheaper wine. Lately I’ve been seeing cork more often, so either we were lied to years ago, or something changed. Either way, I’m happy to see the change. I’ve always thought cork was a pretty cool material.
I couldn't comment on the biological aspect, to be honest. What I can say is that cork bark, compared to other trees, grows extremely thick, porous, wet and flexible. I've never seen anything like this process done to another tree species.
It's also worth it to say that young trees need to be de-corked once (when they're around 20 years old) before they'll produce useable cork. It grows much smoother after this first peel, which looks a lot more like normal bark (just much thicker).
The world is swinging back to natural materials, for better or worse. I'm biased of course but in this case I'm a fan purely because the physical properties are so good and there's so much space to make it more economical to consumers.
That’s interesting about the young cork. I saw that it can take a couple harvests to get something good.
I had a bottle of wine a few months ago with a really bad cork. It did seem more like bark. I guess I can assume that came from a younger tree, borderline too young maybe.
It's possible that it was a composite cork, made from leftover bits ground and put in a polymer binder. Or like you said, poor selection at the factory. Hope the wine was still ok!
As a 'new resident' of Portugal, something I've come to appreciate is the understanding of the land that is part of Portuguese culture. I would imagine that such sympathy is a great opportunity, given how important sustainable farming (and sustainable everything else) is to our future.
Welcome to Portugal! Even though I'm a farmer, I'm a city rat myself but yeah, we're blessed with great places to visit and especially eat :) My email is on a few other comments, feel free to get in touch if you need any help settling in. I'm based in Lisbon and always happy to be of service.
It seems that farming, like war, is mostly boredom punctuated by hard physical work and terror. I'm actually glad to see cork is still in demand for the wine industry, there was a period of time when many wineries were switching to caps. Australia uses very little cork for their bottling (apparently wombats like to burrow under the trees).
I know another founder based in Lisbon so look out, if I'm ever there!
If you mean the old-school cork flooring made up of glue-on squares, it's great stuff. I have it and love it to bits. I don't think more than a dozen people per year worldwide install it at this point :) I hope it comes back into fashion.
The newer multi-layer flooring is indistinguishable from plastic flooring. No point to it.
I can't stress how boring the Montado is - really just a very sparse, quiet forest. But you're welcome to visit! You can find my email on this thread, drop me a line.
The harvest is tough work but it's the only well-paid trade left in agriculture. I doubt it has much future beyond fodder for high peasant magazine articles. Trees are dying left and right from multiple climate-related problems no one has a handle on. Divestment from the traditional montado like mine into intensive production units with better water management and automated extraction is the likely future. The billion-dollar outfits have started experiments with high-density groves, inspired by the olive oil industry's success. It's a finicky tree though, so conclusive results are taking a few decades more than you'd expect to materialise. They're stuck having to buy cork from thousands of traditionalist family farms for now.
But that's assuming the industry even grows enough to justify the investment into better plantations. Legitimate uses for the stuff apart from wine corks are scarce. We're all hoping that our phenomenal ecological footprint will see us grow as an industry into everything from insulation and roofing to shopping bags and umbrellas (hence said puff piece I imagine). We'll see, it really is a phenomenal material and the carbon math makes sense at the source. You can almost see the tree sucking out stuff from the air and soil to build thicker layers of bark. I joke that we've been doing regenerative farming for generations, we just didn't know it until someone told us.
If anyone on HN is ever in Portugal and wants to visit a montado, happy to take y'all on the most boring tour of your life. But we can have a nice picnic! It's lovely country.