Cork screwed?
Not a comment on the sometime Venice of the North at all, but a wine-related issue (though the ads on Spittoon, where I first saw this story this morning, seem not to know the difference. Or does the hellish internet tailor its advertising to suit the beholder, and offer me sexy Cork singles, who want to meet me, because it thinks it knows where I am? I can't keep up.
If alternatives to natural cork are going to stopper more or less all wine bottles in ten years' time or so, there's every reason to suppose some other use will be found for all the land currently occupied by the cork forests. The indigenous fauna, not to mention tens of thousands of people besides, had better start paying attention to those want ads. As usual, Tom Wark is on the case, and the money, and the ball, &c.
Jamie Goode doesn't want to be known as the closure guy, but if you want to get an overview, he has done his homework. Which is more than can be said for me: I haven't even read the WWF pdf, which I've linked from today's post title, yet. Might take it with me on holiday to Donegal next week as a bit of displacement activity from whatever fat-book-that-won't-be-read I bring.
At our spring trade tasting in Dublin this year, I - ever so slightly tongue in cheek - asked our Chablis supplier, Alain Gautherin (pouring), when he'd be going over to screwcaps. He nearly threw me out of the window and into the very noticeably corked, ahem, wine-dark Liffey beneath. He was quite certain that a neighbour in Chablis who'd started to use an alternative closure would fall flat on his face and be back to cork before you could say knife.
Which is what I'll be, not case sensitive. I'm off tonight to drive to the other end of the country for a week of not doing anything much, and nothing at all that even resembles the day job. I'll have to hand the blog over to the other Bubble Brothers for the duration. Plant ya now, dig ya later, as they say.
Oh, two postscripts:
PS drank a glass of French wine with the dinner last night, didn't wear me culottes and re-read Carlyle and a Tale of Two Cities sitting in the tumbril . Actually, only the first of these is true.
PS "This is why you should never buy a computer that doesn’t have a floppy drive." Technology, bah, humbug. A lightning-charred stick and a piece of birch bark are your only friend, trust me. Should have sent blinking Caxton back to his friends on the Continong while we still had the chance.
At our spring trade tasting in Dublin this year, I - ever so slightly tongue in cheek - asked our Chablis supplier, Alain Gautherin (pouring), when he'd be going over to screwcaps. He nearly threw me out of the window and into the very noticeably corked, ahem, wine-dark Liffey beneath. He was quite certain that a neighbour in Chablis who'd started to use an alternative closure would fall flat on his face and be back to cork before you could say knife.
Which is what I'll be, not case sensitive. I'm off tonight to drive to the other end of the country for a week of not doing anything much, and nothing at all that even resembles the day job. I'll have to hand the blog over to the other Bubble Brothers for the duration. Plant ya now, dig ya later, as they say.
Oh, two postscripts:
PS drank a glass of French wine with the dinner last night, didn't wear me culottes and re-read Carlyle and a Tale of Two Cities sitting in the tumbril . Actually, only the first of these is true.
PS 
