In the 1600s a Benedictine monk called Dom Perignon observed that wooden stoppers wrapped in oil-soaked rags used to seal his bottles of sparkling wine often popped out, and so he replaced them with the conical pieces of cork to seal his bottles of sparkling wine.
Cork soon become essential for wine bottling. The world's first cork stopper factory opened in around 1750, in Anguine (Spain).
The best cork comes from Portugal, and the country is the world's leading cork producer.
The bark of mature cork trees is harvested just once every nine years. Cork trees are not regarded mature enough for bark harvesting until they are at least 25 years old, and the bark itself is not suitable for wine corks until the third harvest. A cork tree will yield 13 to 18 useful harvests in its lifetime.
The processing of cork oak bark includes repeated sorting, boiling, punching, slicing, polishing, washing, drying, finishing and wax coating, and takes about a year.
The cork’s cell-like structure (there are around 800 million cells in a single wine cork) makes it best sealing material for wine bottles. However, the cork may sometimes become contaminated with harmless but foul-smelling trichloroanisole thus causing cork taint in wine.
Recently cork has also been used in rocket technology due to its fire resistance.
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