Synthetic Bottle Stopper?
If cork is so good then why is the wine industry going to synthetic bottle stoppers?
One word: price
A high quality cork bottle stopper can be as much as 50 cents. A synthetic bottle stopper costs about 5 cents. Multiply 45 cents by millions of bottles of wine and you get quite a good return on your investment of synthetic bottle stoppers.
I feel I should say something in favor of the synthetics. There are 2 other factors at play. Although if the first factor was not there, something would be done to make sure these were not a problem.
1) There is less occurance of “cork taint” from synthetics.
2) The wine industry can outstrip the cork industry’s production ablility quickly because grape vines can be planted and harvested in a rather short time compared to cork trees which take 40 years to produce viable bottle stopper cork and then can only be havested once every 10 years after that. We believe this is what has caused some people to claim a cork “shortage”. It is only a shortage because the wine industry has grown so fast, not becasue there is less cork.
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