SECTION 3
Passage-5
Read the text below and answer Questions 28-40.
Cooks have been used as bottle stoppers for as long as we have had wine. The Greeks in the fifth century BC sometimes used corks to close wine jugs. Following in their footsteps, the Romans also used the cork as a stopper and also coated corks with pitch to seal the closure. Cork was not immediately as successful as it is today and historian, Sally Marshall, explains why. “Cork's success as a closure depends upon its fitting snugly into an opening with a relatively uniform diameter. Thus, it was not until the 17th century when glass bottles were first made with openings more or less the same size, that the cork truly came into its own”.
Every time someone buys a bottle sealed with a natural cork stopper, they are helping to sustain one of the world's most biodiverse forests and protect an extraordinary ecosystem and industry. Using cork also helps protecting jobs. Jose Riverra, a Portuguese cork grower explains, “While it might seem counterintuitive the best way to ensure that there is no shortage of cork is to use more cork. That is because the greater the demand for cork, the greater the economic incentive there will be to protect cork forests for future generations”.
Cork's unique attributes make it a multipurpose material. Because it is composed of a honeycomb of microscopic cells, it is very light, easy to compress yet strong, impermeable to liquids and gases, adaptable to temperature and pressure, an insulator against moisture and noise, and resilient to fire. When it comes to preserving wine, cork allows just the right amount of oxygen to interact with the liquid, making it the perfect material to allow wine to age properly. Wine connoisseur, Jean Costaud, says it also adds to the wine experience. “It's all to do with when the wine is opened. No artificial stopper can come close to reproducing the iconic 'pop' when the cork is removed”.
With all the beneficial properties of corks as bottle closures, there is one significant defect. This is 'corkiness', a condition that exists when wine is tainted by the presence of a chemical compound called 2, 4, 6 - Trichloeoanisolle - TCA for short. This compound appears to be caused in the cork by the interaction of moisture, chlorine and mould that is always there. Corks are exposed to these elements during their production and TCA can form. Unfortunately, a human nose can detect this 'corkiness' at concentration as low as four parts per trillion! Jean Costaud explains the problem, “A lightly corked wine may simply smell like cork, while a badly corked wine smells musty, like damp cardboard of old newspaper. The usual rich aroma and taste of the wine is stripped away by the musty odor”.
Artificial corks and screw tops are the two main alternatives to natural wood corks. An artificial cork is made of ethylene vinyl acetate. It looks and feels like the real cork and a corkscrew is used to remove it from the bottle. It has two drawbacks: one is that if often fits so tightly in the bottle that it is very difficult to remove (a problem that will no doubt be resolved through research). American wine producer, Alice Deacon, is more interested in the second more technical problem. “We want to know whether the synthetic material is truly non-reactive and inert over long periods of time. Will it impart any tastes of its own to the wine?” Naturally wineries using these plastic corks are deliberately aging wines to see what happens, but it is too soon by several years to know the outcome. Nonetheless, more and more low and midrange producers are switching to an artificial cork.
The screw cap provides an excellent air tight seal, although there is a question as to whether or not it will protect the wine over a very long period of time. The problem with the screw cap is psychological. Wine merchant, Mary Winters, sums up her clients' feelings. “The image of a screw cap is firmly lodged in many minds as the epitome of cheap wine. Because of this many of the fine wine producers we deal with are sensitive to the fine wine market. They hesitate to switch to a screw cap, because they do not want their wine to be perceived as of inferior quality”.
Supporters of cork publicise its environmentally friendly properties. The 6.6 million acres of cork oak forests in the Mediterranean Basin not only serve as a refuge for endangered species they also help reduce greenhouse emission. Environmentalist, Charles Wrathe, explains, “It seems like a small thing, but every cork stopper represents a carbon offset of 113.5 grams”. Looked at differently, the 6.6 million acres of Mediterranean cork oaks capture approximately 14.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide”.
While waiting for the wine industry to make up its mind, cork has diversified in recent years, fashion designers and shoe manufacturers have started to use cork to create their signature footwear. Mike Baker, a CEO at a footwear company is a big fan. “The transformation of used wine corks into durable and attractive footwear is an easy and elegant way to extend the lifecycle of this remarkable material while providing consumers with terrific and fashionable new product that literally lightens their carbon footprint”.
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