The Mystery of the Cork

Until Lynne asked me to help with the bottling, I never gave more than a cursory thought to what is surely most people’s first question about wine-making: how do they get the cork in the bottle?? (It is, after all, such a damn nuisance to get out…)

Consequently, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this over the weekend. And I’ve reached the conclusion that getting the cork in the bottle must be rather like the question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? (Ok, maybe not really, since you couldn’t possibly fire the glass around the cork and still get the wine inside (…or could you?). 

As I said, quite a bit of time.

The most entertaining of my imaginings involved a somehow shrunken cork that magically expands to fill the hole and seal the bottle when you touch it against the inside of the bottle neck with a pair of sterilized tongues (yes, Health and Safety regulations were even featured in my oh-so-thorough daydreams). In my imagination, corking was rather like...building a ship-in-a-bottle that displays full sail after you pull the string (assuming you’ve assembled the pieces correctly).

But while amusing, and with a distracting element of mystery (how does that cork know just when to expand?), this theory doesn’t make much—all right, not any—sense at all. First of all, the bottle in my theory was lying on its side. Given that it was supposedly full of wine at the time, well, it was quite the reality-defying cogitation as not a single drop of the ruby liquid was sacrificed. (It is also interesting that the wine in question was red, since we will be bottling the Riesling and Vidal…but that’s a puzzle for Mr. Freud).

After a while, I gave up these crazy theories and returned to my general state of twenty-first century disillusionment with the realization that there must be some nifty gadget invented specifically to cork wine bottles (there is: it’s called a <<gasp>> bottle corker). But since I wasn’t quite ready to return to the myriad papers that my professors misguidedly decided it would be a good idea to assign a second-semester senior, I began to wonder how the ancients corked wine before the advent of such useful technologies.

Of course, I forgot that we’re talking about a particularly innovative species with a decided taste for alcoholic beverages. The ancients had their ways…

Though the ancient Egyptians used corks as bottle stoppers thousands of years ago, it wasn’t until the 1600s that a French monk named Dom Pérignon first used cork to stop sparkling wine bottles. (He had noticed that the traditional wooden stoppers often popped out and that cork provided a much better seal).

Around 1770, corks began being used to stop cylindrical bottles, allowing for the first time the slow maturation of wine in a glass container. As bottles became mass-produced with uniform necks, the use of corks as stoppers spread. Today, Portugal is the world’s leading cork producer.

Well, that’s about all I know (and pretty much the extent of what the Internet can tell me), so I’ll have to wait until I finish my first experience with bottling on Wednesday to give you a full reckoning of the process. Until then…happy uncorking!