Green your wine drinking: To cork, or not to cork
Traditionally, wines that come with a screw-top have carried the stigma of being cheap and inferior -- probably because most of them were freakin' terrible. These days, more respectable wine-makers are turning their back on the cork. While their marketing departments say that the screw-top protects both taste and the environment, many green-types think the switch is little more than a greenwashed cost-cutting measure. According to Treehugger, corks allow a tiny amount of air to seep into most bottles. Up to 10% of these bottles get "corked" (i.e. go sour) because to the inconsistency of the old-school method. Losing 1/10th of your product due to faulty packaging seems pretty wasteful. Others contend that amount of wine lost is more like 1-2%, and that the renewable cork forests of Europe contain one of the world's highest levels of forest biodiversity -- like the Spanish wolf. Restrict their usefulness, they say, and these forests will get plowed under by developers.
One thing's for sure, this could be bad news for the makers of those high-tech corkscrews.
[via Treehugger]
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