Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/467731
8 2 V I N E YA R D & W I N E RY M A N A G E M E N T | M a r - A p r 2 015 w w w. v w m m e d i a . c o m If Portugal's cork industry ever lost its wine stopper business, the industry would also lose 70% of its value, and therefore its viability. For decades, this sobering fact didn't seem to worry Portuguese cork producers, secure in their position as "the only game in town." "The years before 2000 were a dictatorship," confirmed Amorim public relations and corporate com- munications representative Raul Valle, in which the cork industry took advantage of the lack of com- petition. "Production was the main concern, not quality," he said. All that changed at the turn of the Millennium, when U.S. winer- ies – tired of dealing with cork-taint issues – began defecting to other closures. In response, Portugal's cork industry established the Interna- tional Code of Cork Stoppers Manu- facturing Practices in 2000 to help enforce quality control standards. A second phase of the code, intro- duced in 2001, outlined measures to be adopted in the forests, during the production process and in the transportation of cork stoppers. In June 2002, APCOR, the asso- ciation of Portuguese cork produc- ers, received $2.3 million from the Portuguese government and pri- vate cork producers to fund inde- Measuring Portugal's Progress A dozen years of cork evolution While people still play an important part in Portugal's cork industry, new technol- ogy promises to make the analysis of individual corks available on a large scale. Photo: APCOR BY TINA CAPUTO EDITOR-IN-CHIEF