This exclusive material is only available in full to paid subscribers. If you are a free subscriber, please consider a full subscription. If you are a paid subscriber, please consider giving a gift subscription to a friend.
Today’s humor
Why did the Clydesdale give the pony a drink of water? Because the pony was a little horse. Wine time.
Cork
Traditionally, wine is a marvelous marriage of two plants: wine grapevines and cork oak trees.
Almost the perfect closure, cork is elastic (fits snugly in the bottle) and—with 35 million cells per cubic centimeter—almost impermeable. Those millions of cells also hold minute quantities of air that help finish wine as it ages in bottle.
Cork bark harvesting does not kill the tree. Harvests begin when trees are about 25 years old and repeat every six-to-nine years. During its 200-year life, a single tree will yield about one million wine bottle corks.
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Gus Clemens on Wine to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
