ProCork

Ancient Greeks also used cork oak bark to make fishing buoys, sandals and stoppers for vessels for wine and olive oil.

In the 1600s, a French monk called Dom Pérignon, took a giant step towards the modern, most widespread use of cork — as a wine closure. Containers holding sparkling wine traditionally had been plugged by wooden stoppers wrapped in olive oil-soaked hemp. Dom Pérignon observed that these stoppers often popped out. He successfully swapped the conical plugs for cork stoppers and cork soon became essential for wine bottling.

Fueled by a rapidly growing wine industry, demand for cork increased, sending ripples into Catalonia in Spain. The world's first cork stopper factory opened in around 1750, in Anguine, Spain, marking the beginning of the industrial application of cork.

Cork stoppers arrived in Portugal around 1700. Some 70 years later they were used in cylindrical bottles in Oporto, allowing the wine to mature slowly in a glass receptacle for the first time.

Production boomed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1890 and 1917, the industry's workforce more than doubled and by 1930 it had increased fivefold, to a total of 10,000 workers. By this time Portugal had become the world's leading cork producer, a position it holds to this day. More than 50 per cent of cork bark currently goes into stoppers, including natural wine corks, champagne corks, bar-top corks for fortified wines and spirits and small corks for other uses.

Cork oak forests make a substantial contribution to the economy and ecology of several Mediterranean countries and they cover a worldwide area of 2,200,000 hectares.

An analysis of cork forest distribution by country shows that Portugal has around 33% of the world total, corresponding to an area of approximately 730,000 hectares. It produces 185,000 tons of cork per year and accounts for 54 per cent of world production by volume.

Spain is the next biggest producer with 26 per cent of the world market, followed by Algeria with six per cent and Italy with five per cent.