A Blooming Hill Vineyard

We are getting ready to bottle – always an adventure, believe me!  This year, we thought we should investigate screw caps vs. corks so, at the annual wine seminar in Oregon, I went to the session on Closures. 

It turned out to be fascinating.  I heard about a lot of things I would never have thought of in a million years – things like water-based colmated corks, polyvinyl chlorides and torque meters.   I listened to discussions of the sensory experience of popping a cork and I heard about the differences in grades of cork.

I had no idea that cork comes from the Oak Tree – Quercus Suber, actually known as the Cork Oak – and that most cork comes from Portugal.  There are issues of sustainability about which to be concerned, none of which I had thought about too much – except that we have been throwing our corks into the compost bin. 

For me, it was a pretty easy decision to go with cork, and with a particular company called ACI.  This is not a commercial for them – we’re paying for our corks! – but we so prefer to do business with people we like and the people at ACI are just terrific. Even if they weren’t, we’d be using cork.  Screw caps can’t be recycled here because there are no facilities in the USA that can process them.  And even if they could, the plastic liner in the cap makes them non-degradable.  It also turns out that corks take so long to break down into compost that it isn’t the best way to handle them.  There are ways to recycle cork and Oregon is a leader in this effort: www.CorkReHarvest.org.   

Jim produces a perfectly natural wine with no chemicals.  He babies his grapes and watches over his wine throughout the entire process.   Jim loves the land – and it seems to love him right back!  I can see his awe at what the land produces from the simple pea vine to the complex grape varietals.  We try to do as much as we can to protect the planet.  Using corks from a company that cares about the environment is important to us so we were delighted to find out a little about ACI.  Here’s what they have to say about sustainability:

 ”Of all of the closures in the fine wine business, only cork is a totally natural and sustainably raised product.  It is harvested from trees that are at least twenty-nine years old and then harvested at a minimum of every nine years thereafter.  The harvesting of the cork bark does not hurt the oak tree.  The tree lives for 150 to 200 years.  The harvest in Portugal is so important that the government requires farmers to replant all oak trees that are cut or die of sickness.  This sustainability has the benefit of increasing the forest (Montado) in the Iberian Peninsula and therefore providing vital habitat for the last of the great cats of the Western European Continent (the Iberian lynx) as well as endangered birds (the Iberian Imperial eagle and the black stork).  It is one of the last truly Mediterranean eco-systems that are preserved in near its original state.” www.acicorkusa.com

I really like that part about the lynx, eagle and – especially – the black stork!

Our corks are imprinted and even the ink they use is an organic based product, a derivative of soy ink. (Actual soy ink comes off – it’s the same as is used on newspapers and you know they don’t pass the white glove test.)

Small Winery Bottling Line!

So, look forward to our 2009 wines, enjoy our 2008s and know that we are doing what we can to preserve our planet.