What Pulling a Real Cork Can Do
By Malcolm Smith
Next time you open a bottle of French champagne or Spanish rioja, pay a little more attention to the cork. That inconsequential-looking bottle stopper may be the key to the survival of one of the richest wildlife habitats in Europe. Called “dehesa” in Spain and “montados” in Portugal, it stretches over roughly 13,000 square miles of undulating land in western Spain and eastern Portugal. Bread-oven hot in midsummer, ice-cold in winter, the habitat is a patchwork of evergreen holm oaks and cork oaks, which grow on flower-speckled summertime grasslands dotted with aromatic shrubs and a sprinkling of cultivated cereals. A bit like the savanna of central Africa, each acre of dehesa supports from 15 to 50 or so trees.
The cork oaks, the thick bark of which is harmlessly stripped off every decade for cork production, are the economic backbone of the dehesa. No fewer than 13 billion cork bottle stoppers are used worldwide every year, the majority made from Spanish and Portuguese cork. But the traditional use of cork for stoppering wine bottles is under threat from the growing use, particularly by New World vintners, of plastic “corks.” If plastic gains a substantial market share, the dehesa/montados habitat could be doomed.
“Dehesa is vital to the continued existence of birds such as the Spanish imperial eagle, its world population only about 170 pairs; the black vulture, Europe’s largest bird of prey; and the rare black stork,” says Mario Diáz, Associate Professor of Zoology at Castilla La Mancha University and a dehesa expert.
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Wildcats, Iberian lynx, and the more widespread common genets—a small, long-tailed, cat-like mammal sacred to the ancient Egyptians—patrol the dehesa at night, hunting for smaller mammals and birds. A few packs of wolves, and an occasional giant-sized eagle owl, do the same.
Cultivated Wilderness
Walk in dehesa early on a spring morning and the sun, a golden
globe on the horizon, suffuses warmth and light. Mist rises
between the olive-colored oaks as the dew of the cool night
slowly evaporates. The trees cast long shadows like rows of
giant soldiers.
The serin (Serinus serinus), a finch with a canary-yellow chest, starts its jingling song—like tiny splinters of falling glass—from the topmost branch of an oak. Soon, greenfinches (Choris sp.) join in with their mellow cadenzas, competing with the roller-coaster pitches of woodlark (Lullula arborea) songs. A flash of blue and cinnamon, coupled with some harsh shrieks, gives away a posse of azure-winged magpies (Cyanopica cyana) as they zoom in follow-the-leader flight from the low branches of one tree to the next.
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| The
endangered Iberian lynx. (©Fernando Ortega) |
Another chorus begins. Gathering metronome-like pace, cicadas—large, brown-winged insects—begin their incessant chatter in one tree, then another, ceasing only when the cold of night returns.
In the distance, an exotically colored hoopoe, all pink, black, and white, shouts the “poop, poop” call from which its name is derived. Large black ants begin their first forays of the day while shrew-sized, brown, furry spiders scuttle around their burrows.
Vivid blue grape hyacinths (Muscari neglectum) and rose-pink gladioli (Gladiolus illyricus) contrast with little purple irises called Barbary nuts (Gynandriris sisyrinchium), giving the green tablemat of turf under the trees a pointillist speckle of colors. On the warming ground, a scattering of dead branches is pockmarked with the burrowing of a myriad of wood-dwelling insects.
Sustainable Use
The dehesa landscape is a product of human activities, but
its origins are not entirely clear. In the turbulent 16th
century, when the Conquistadors—Francisco Pizarro, Hernán
Cortés, Francisco de Orellana, and others—were
destroying the ancient Inca and Aztec civilizations, an army
of peasants was cutting down the primeval forests of Extremadura,
today the westernmost region of Spain.
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But the Extremeños were more selective than their brother Conquistadors in their logging. Creating land for grazing sheep, the peasants understood the importance of leaving some trees to provide summer shade for their livestock.
No one can be sure whether the dehesa was created entirely by such selective tree removal. In places, forests may have been set on fire—an easy task in the blistering summer heat when every scrap of vegetation is dry tinder—and the burnt ground planted with holm and cork oaks.
The world over, farming has become more and more intensive, especially in the last half century. Much greater use of fuel and machinery, together with artificial fertilizers and pesticides, has cast doubt on the sustainability of many agricultural practices. But in the dehesa, farming practices have changed little in centuries.
“Dehesa farming is a sustainable land use,” argues zoologist Diáz. “The farms average about 1,500 acres in size. They grow a little cereal in more open areas, usually oats or barley suited to drought, and use little or no fertilizer. Elsewhere, livestock are grazed.”
Locals commonly graze sheep and, less so, goats. Farm-raised deer necessitate the construction of high fences to keep them contained. Cattle are common too. Red-brown or black fighting bulls frequently become the toro bravo de la corrida, a controversial spectacle that nevertheless remains popular.
Then there are the pigs—delightfully small and almost black pigs, which are the descendants of wild boar. The pigs roam in small herds and feast on the copious quantities of acorns that fall in autumn. The ham they produce—jamón de bellota—is flavored with the taste of acorns and commands high prices, both in Spain and abroad.
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To provide extra browse for livestock, people regularly prune the dehesa trees. The cut branches are left on the ground for livestock to graze; larger branches are sold to make charcoal. Pruning also encourages the trees to branch outward rather than upward, increasing the area of ground they shade. With summer temperatures of almost 105º F, shade is a godsend.
Subsistence farming is an integral part of the dehesa lifestyle. Villagers still gather edible fungi for their own consumption, use rockrose bushes for firewood in their traditional stone bread ovens, and tap local beehives for honey flavored with native lavender and rosemary.
But it’s the harvesting of the naturally thick bark of the cork oaks—the trees’ built-in fire protection—that is the economic mainstay of the dehesa inhabitants. Cork harvesting is a skilled job, carried out using a special curved axe—a machado—wielded with extraordinary precision to make the first cuts before the cork is peeled off, rather like peeling a banana. Where cork oaks abound, the dark orange-red stems of recently harvested trees are a familiar sight.
“The Alentejo and Ribatejo regions of eastern Portugal’s montados and forests produce about half of all the world’s cork while Spain’s dehesas de Extremadura and Andalusia produce another quarter,” says Eduardo Goncalves, who has produced a detailed report on the economics of cork for the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Although much of the lower quality cork is used to make products such as wall tiles, vehicle engine gaskets, and sports equipment, its economic value is derived largely from the best quality bark, which goes to make wine bottle corks. But plastic “corks,” many of them made to resemble the real thing, are stoppering more and more wine bottles, especially at the cheaper end of the market. Other winemakers are starting to use metal screw-cap closures. Why?
The simple answer is cork taint. Some wines have a musty smell when you open them and are often described as “corked.” The musty smell is due to a chemical called TCA, or trichloroanisole, produced by the interaction of molds in the cork pores with traces of bleach used to sanitize the cork.
Wine experts and industry insiders quote a wide array of figures about how commonplace cork taint actually is: from less than one bottle in 100 to as many as one in 12. Much of the variation might be explained by how severe the taint actually is, anything from a foul, wet-carpet odor at its worst to a wine in which the taste is flat or dull. Variation also depends on the person doing the tasting. Discerning wine quality is an art, not a science.
Some wine-industry insiders are critical of the cork producers’ complacency in assuming that wine drinkers are willing to accept the occasional bottle of tainted, and sometimes undrinkable, wine. They claim that the producers have underestimated the problem and rely on the continued use of cork stoppers merely because they are the traditional means of sealing bottles.
But the cork producers in Spain and Portugal are waking up, hit by a decline in their bottle-cork market and negative comments in such prominent publications as The Times of London. In May of 2002, APCOR, the Portuguese Cork Association, announced a $1-million research fund to tackle cork taint.
“This initiative demonstrates clearly that we are dedicating the appropriate resources to finding a solution to TCA in natural cork stoppers industry-wide,” said Francisco de Brito Evangelista, director of APCOR’s International Campaign for Cork.
Even the Prince of Wales has entered the debate. “Something as apparently simple as the decision by some winemakers to use plastic stoppers instead of traditional cork can have far reaching impacts. Quite why anyone should want to encounter a nasty plastic plug in a wine bottle is beyond me,” he said when he received the 2002 Euronatur Award for his efforts to protect the environment. “The production of cork is a sustainable industry. The trees live for centuries. And the dehesas provide a rich and varied wildlife habitat. All this is under threat,” he added.
Cork Economics
According to Eduardo Goncalves, in the five to ten
years since plastic corks first appeared, they have usurped
up to seven percent of the bottle-stopper market. If this
rise continues to 15 percent, he argues, “A surplus
of cork could trigger significant price drops, causing dehesa
farmers to go out of business or to consider alternative crops,
such as eucalyptus trees that grow well in the climate of
the western Iberian Peninsula.”
As a wildlife habitat, however, eucalyptus is a disaster. Although it attracts lower government subsidies than planting dehesa trees, eucalyptus can be harvested within a decade. Quality cork can’t be harvested until an oak is half a century old.
“In all the Mediterranean regions, native forests are being replaced with non-indigenous species,” says Clara Landeiro of World Wildlife Fund. “They’re not the right trees for the conditions. They suck up water from the soil, take all the nutrients, and don’t give anything back.” Landeiro warns of desert creeping north as the soil becomes incapable of supporting plant growth. Global warming could make the threat even more severe.
A major slump in the quality cork market would jeopardize the jobs of some 40,000 cork harvesters and processors in Spain and Portugal. It would also substitute a synthetic product whose production consumes large amounts of chemicals and energy for a natural and biodegradable one. If sustainability were ever to be translated into practical reality, cork would win every time.
But not all conservation organizations agree that plastic stoppers pose such a problem. “Even though cork exports have declined slightly, the area of montados in Portugal has expanded a little since the 1980s because young trees have been planted with government or European Union cash support,” suggests José Martins of Quercus, Portugal’s largest environmental non-governmental organization.
In Spain, the cork industry claims that the dehesa area has increased by as much as 800 square miles in the last decade (a figure hard to believe), although counterclaims suggest that it has declined because of illegal tree cutting. Mario Diáz of Castilla La Mancha University believes that overall the area of dehesa has fallen.
This confusion arises for two reasons. First, there is no detailed mapping of dehesa from which its area can be accurately measured. Second, the limits of the habitat are very difficult to define because its trees become more and more scattered until they give way entirely to pasture or arable croplands.
National and regional laws in Spain and Portugal forbid the cutting or digging out of dehesa/montados trees. Authorization to do so is rarely given, except when trees are dead or diseased. But, rumors abound that trees are sometimes removed or cut under dubious circumstances to make way for more productive crops or for real estate.
More important, perhaps, is the protection that the two countries, as member states of the European Union, will be obliged to give to large areas of dehesa to implement the EU’s Habitats Directive. Dehesa is included on the directive as one of the most important habitats requiring conservation measures in Western Europe.
Dehesa protected by the directive cannot be cut unless the land is required for reasons of overriding national importance. Even then, the EU is likely to insist on the member state replanting elsewhere to create a similar—or greater—area of habitat. What’s more, the member state has to ensure that any dehesa protected by the directive, whether privately owned (as most is) or in public ownership, is protected and managed to guarantee its long-term survival.
To date, the Spanish government has proposed 1,850 square miles of dehesa, and the Portuguese government 460 square miles, for protection under this directive. That comprises about 18 percent of the total habitat that exists in the two countries. According to a European Commission spokesman concerned with the directive’s implementation in the two countries, the two governments are going to have to increase the area given such protection before agreement with the EU is reached.
It’s easy to see why dehesa is such an important wildlife habitat. “Up to 60 different plant species can be found in a square yard of dehesa turf,” says Mario Diáz. “More diverse communities of butterflies and small birds are supported by the habitat, too, than by neighboring woodland and grassland. Dehesa with scrub—lavenders, brooms, and halimium—tend to have more warblers and blackbirds, while those with areas of cereal crops attract crested larks and corn buntings.”
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| A
warbler. (©Gabriel Sierra) |
In the shimmering heat of summer, butterflies skip between the trees: large, yellow-and-black swallowtails (left); red, black, and yellow Spanish festoons; and, sometimes, gorgeous green, burnt-orange and black cardinals looking for thistles to feed from. In winter, when frosts and cold winds bite, the dehesas are hearth and home to most of northwestern Europe’s 60,000 common cranes (Grus grus). There are few natural sights more impressive than a group of these stately birds, nearly four feet tall with tails reminiscent of an Edwardian lady’s bustle, walking serenely between the oaks feeding on acorns.
At this quieter time of year, too, a vast army of other northern European breeding birds—including masses of robins and black redstarts—are camped out in the trees where many insects keep the birds fed.
Conserving this magnificent habitat is easy enough, even if you live a world away from Western Europe’s dehesas. If you are sipping champagne at your birthday party, or having a bottle of red wine at your favorite restaurant, insist on a bottle stopped with real cork, and then raise your glass to sustainable agriculture. Salud!
—Malcolm Smith is Chief Scientist and Senior Director of the Countryside Council for Wales. He writes regularly in The Times and other national papers in the United Kingdom.
ZooGoer 32(3) 2003.
Copyright 2003 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
