51. Wine Corks

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things — Episode 51: Wine Corks

Host: Zachary Crockett (Freakonomics Network)
Guest/Expert: Carlos DeJesus (Director of Communications at Amorim Cork & “Portuguese Cork Expert”)
Date: June 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Zachary Crockett dives into the fascinating world of wine corks—a product with ancient roots, huge economic impact, and an uncertain future. He explores the cork’s journey from oak forests in Portugal to wine bottles around the globe, uncovers the economic, environmental, and cultural significance of cork, and investigates the industry’s response to modern challenges like screw caps and “cork taint.”

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Ancient Art of Cork Harvesting

• Cork Origins: Cork has been harvested in the western Mediterranean for thousands of years and used historically for shoes, fishing gear, and bottle stoppers.

• Harvesting Process: The cork is stripped from cork oak trees (Quercus suber) in Portugal, producing a unique sound unchanged since Roman times.

  • Quote: “That moment. That sound is exactly the same sound The Romans heard 2,000 years ago.” — Carlos DeJesus [00:48]

• Sensory Magic: The harvest transforms the tree orange with a honeysuckle scent, creating a magical scene.

  • Quote: “The tree becomes orange, and there’s this really sweet honeysuckle kind of smell around. And there’s a thump and the birds are singing. I can tell you it’s truly magical.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [01:21]

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2. Portugal’s Dominance and the Economics of Cork

• Portugal’s Leadership: The country produces half the world’s cork, aided by a climate ideal for cork oaks and centuries-old forest protection policies.
  • “We have over one third of the cork forests in existence in the world.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [04:00]
• Natural Barriers: Cork oaks grow slowly. Cork can’t be harvested until a tree is 25 years old, and top-quality cork for wine stoppers comes only after 43 years.
  • Quote: “It’s a slow-growing tree...you have to have a certain vision and a certain way of looking at sustainability and the long term.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [04:40]

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3. Transforming Cork into Wine Stoppers

• Production Journey: After harvest, cork is seasoned for 6–9 months, boiled for pliability, then sorted. Only 30% of cork is suitable for wine stoppers.

• Amorim’s Reach: Ships corks to more than 20,000 wineries worldwide, producing about 6 billion corks a year—over $800 million in revenue [01:44, 01:53].

• Cork’s Unique Role: Each cork stopper contains around 800 million cells (“Each one…with a little bit of gas…that is going to shape the evolution of that wine…” — [06:35]), making the closure decision essential to winemaking.

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4. Market Challenges: Cork Taint and Rising Competition

• Cork Taint (TCA): Cork can ruin wine via TCA contamination; in the early 2000s, up to 9.5% of bottles were affected [11:06].

  • Quote: “This actually had an impact in people’s lives, in jobs, in companies, in businesses.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [10:17]

• Industry Response: Advent of plastic, synthetic cork, and screw caps to avoid cork taint.

  • Quote: “Since we got our proverbial kick in the back from the plastics and then the screw capsule, the research and development start producing really, really interesting results.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [11:33]

• High-Tech Screening: Amorim introduced “NDTech,” a gas chromatography system detecting TCA at 0.5 nanograms—a drop in 800 Olympic pools [11:46, 11:57].

  • Quote: “It’s something like finding one drop of water in 800 Olympic sized swimming pools.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [11:57]

• Skepticism Remains: “There’s no such thing as zero in science...we have a really good risk management policy and that’s what we have been doing.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [12:22]

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5. Shifting Tides in Wine Closures

• Market Share Decline: Cork stoppers have fallen from 96% to 70% market share over 30 years [02:07, 07:35].
• Consumer Perceptions: US consumers pay 8% more for wine with real cork [07:11].
• Regional Trends: Screw-cap adoption is high: NZ (95%), Australia (75–78%)—though Australia remained a cork growth market due to Chinese demand for corked bottles [13:01–13:31].

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6. Sustainability and Recycling

• Environmental Angle: Cork is unique among closures for its sustainable lifecycle. Harvesting cork encourages carbon capture as trees regrow bark [15:20, 15:28].

  • “Harvesting cork… boosts their carbon consumption because they absorb more CO2 as they grow back their lost bark.” — Carlos DeJesus [15:31]

• Cork Afterlife: Can’t be used again as a wine cork but is recycled into building materials, fashion (notably Birkenstock soles), insulation, and more [14:47–15:00].

  • Amorim’s recycling initiatives collected 915 tons in 2023 [14:11].
  • Quote: “The value of one ton of recycled cork can be as much as $1200–$1300 a ton. Now, this is a lot more than the equivalent amount of plastic or other recycled materials.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [14:24]

• Energy Efficiency: Factories partly powered by cork dust—up to 95% in some cases [15:51].

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7. The Future: Innovation and Patience

• Accelerating Growth: Amorim bought 20,000 acres and uses irrigation to “trick” trees into growing faster—reducing wait for viable cork from 43 to about 10–12 years [16:36, 16:46].

  • Quote: “If you trick the tree into thinking that there are enough resources that the tree can grow faster, then the tree does grow faster.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [16:46]

• Dual-Stopping Trend: Some champagnes use two corks: one during fermentation and one for sale, doubling demand (and potential business) [17:10].

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Your propensity to listen when you have 96 or 97% market share, that propensity does not go up, on the contrary. So we paid a price for that.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [02:07]
• “Winemakers around the world know that the choice of closure is the ultimate winemaking decision.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [06:35]
• “Imagine that you could run a poll around the world...what do you think are the five happy sounds of humankind? I bet you that that pop on that cork will be one of them.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [17:40]
• “If I propose to any of our listeners...‘We’re going to...wait 43 years for this asset to start maturing and yielding something interesting.’ That would be a short meeting.” — Portuguese Cork Expert [16:08]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:33–01:50: Introduction to cork harvesting, Portugal’s landscape, and Amorim Cork’s scale
• 04:35–06:35: Cork oak growth, barriers to entry, and wine stopper production
• 07:03–07:41: Consumer perceptions and closure choices
• 09:50–11:13: Cork economics and the problem of TCA (cork taint)
• 11:33–12:42: Amorim’s Technological Solutions (NDTech) and remaining skepticism
• 13:01–13:47: Global closure trends & the China effect
• 14:00–15:57: Recycling cork, value added, and environmental benefits
• 16:28–17:02: Amorim’s investments and accelerating tree growth
• 17:10–17:40: Dual-cork trend in champagne
• 17:40–18:04: The happy sound of the cork “pop”

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Tone & Style

The episode balances historical storytelling, economic analysis, and technical explanation, peppered with charming anecdotes and pride in Portuguese heritage—captured in Carlos DeJesus’ evocative descriptions of the cork harvest and the “happy sound” of a popping cork. The tone is informative, warm, and lightly humorous, making even the technical industrial processes feel engaging.

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For anyone who hasn’t listened:
This episode offers a nuanced look at how a simple item like the wine cork reflects centuries of craft, present-day economics, sustainability challenges, and shifting global preferences. You’ll come away appreciating the long journey and science behind every celebratory “pop.”

Transcript

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If you travel through southern Portugal's dry,

[Carlos DeJesus]

hilly Alentejo region between the months of May and August, you might hear this sound.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

That moment. That sound is exactly the same sounds The Romans heard 2,000 years ago.

[Carlos DeJesus]

That's Carlos DeJesus.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

He's the director of communications at Amarim

[Carlos DeJesus]

Cork, the world's largest cork producer.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

And the sound he's talking about is

[Carlos DeJesus]

an axe hitting a cork tree during the cork harvest.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

It's a delicate job. The harvester has to cut into the

[Carlos DeJesus]

tree just enough to access the layer beneath the bark.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

That layer, the cork itself is then stripped away.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

The tree becomes orange, and there's this really sweet honeysuckle kind of smell around. And there's a thump and the birds are singing. I can tell you it's truly magical.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Amaram's cork gets turned into a variety of products. Shoes, flooring, insulation. But about one third of it is carved into little cylinders that get stuffed

[Carlos DeJesus]

into the necks of wine bottles.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

And every year, we sell about 6 billion of these corks around the world.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Those 6 billion corks translate into more

[Carlos DeJesus]

than $800 million in annual revenue.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

But these days in the wine business,

[Carlos DeJesus]

cork is no longer the only game in town.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

Back in the 90s, Quark would have 96, 97% market share. And we all know that your propensity to listen when you have 96 or 97% market share, that propensity does not go up, on the contrary. So we paid a price for that.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

For the Freakonomics radio network, this is

[Carlos DeJesus]

the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Today, wine corks. Cork has been harvested in the western

[Carlos DeJesus]

Mediterranean region for thousands of years.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Early civilizations used it to make sandals

[Carlos DeJesus]

and fishing gear or to close jugs and barrels.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

It wasn't until the 17th century that Cork found what some might consider its

[Carlos DeJesus]

true calling in northeastern France.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

So it is when a little known wine region called Champagne back in the 1600s, it had a problem to solve they had a good wine, but very quickly the whole thing went south if you didn't package it well. And that's when that incredible connection between wine glass and cork comes together.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Legend has it that the first person who had the idea to close a

[Carlos DeJesus]

champagne bottle with a piece of cork was a monk with a familiar name, Dom Perignon.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

While champagne and other regions of France became famous for their wines, the story of cork itself is distinctly Portuguese.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

Well, as a Portuguese, yeah, cork is part of your identity. It is the only thing where effectively and objectively, Portugal is a world leader.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Portugal produces half of the world's cork, but that didn't happen by accident. Portugal's climate is very hospitable to cork oak trees. It's sunny, humid and not particularly rainy.

[Carlos DeJesus]

But there's another reason the Portuguese have remained the world's biggest cork producers.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

The protection of the cork forest in Portugal dates back to the 1200s. We have over one third of the cork forests in existence in the world.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

The cork oak tree is a species called Quercus suber. They can live for centuries and each

[Carlos DeJesus]

one can produce 100 pounds of cork every time it's harvested.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Cork oaks are also beautiful to look

[Carlos DeJesus]

at, with wide trunks that turn orange after the harvest and dark green leaves. So why isn't every country planting forests of Quercus suber to get into the cork market?

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

It turns out cork production has a natural barrier to entry.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

It's a slow growing tree. You cannot touch a cork oak until about 25 years have gone by. So that's more or less when you do the first harvest. The first harvest does not yield quality cork, and by law, you cannot go back to that tree until at least minimum, nine years have gone by. Second harvest still not good enough to make natural cork stoppers that are the big generator of value for both the forest and the industry. It's only the third harvest, so off the bat, you're going to have 43 years of growth and care before that tree matures. People are planting core Cokes, but you have to have a certain vision and a certain way of looking at sustainability and the long term that it's not really on the radar of a lot of people.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

After it's been stripped from the mature trees, the cork gets hauled away to

[Carlos DeJesus]

massive outdoor stores, storage units, where it seasons and stabilizes for six to nine months.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Then it's boiled, which sanitizes it and

[Carlos DeJesus]

also makes it more pliable.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Afterwards, humans and machines assess millions of planks of cork to decide how each

[Carlos DeJesus]

one will be used.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

And that decision is going to determine if that piece of cork is going to end up in a bottle of wine. Only 30% of these millions and millions of planks of cork is good enough.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Once its caliber is determined, the cork is cut into strips and punched with

[Carlos DeJesus]

a machine to extract the cylindrical stoppers.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Following yet another round of quality control, Amaram ships its corks out to more

[Carlos DeJesus]

than 20,000 wineries around the world.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

They rely on Amaram's corks to keep

[Carlos DeJesus]

their wine safely inside the bottle and to improve its taste over time.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

One single cork stopper packs into it about 800 million cells. Each one of them carries a little bit of a gas, very similar to the air that we breathe, which, of course has oxygen. And that is going to shape the evolution of that wine just as it shapes any other chemical reaction. And winemakers around the world know that the choice of closure is the ultimate winemaking decision.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Wine drinkers care about that decision, too. A 2019 study from the Journal of Wine Economics found that US consumers will

[Carlos DeJesus]

pay an average of 8% more for a bottle of wine that has a cork closure rather than a screw cap. But cork has its challenges. It can actually ruin a bottle of wine.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

And it's expensive. Natural cork closures can cost up to

[Carlos DeJesus]

$2 each, compared to screw caps, which cost around 20.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Today, cork stoppers are found in just

[Carlos DeJesus]

70% of wine bottles, a drop of more than 25 percentage points from 30 years ago.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

And that's a shrinking share of a shrinking market because wine production and consumption

[Carlos DeJesus]

are on the decline.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

So how does the world's largest cork producer cope?

[Carlos DeJesus]

That's coming up.

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[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

In Portugal, cork is a significant industry. Exports of cork and Cork products exceeded

[Carlos DeJesus]

$1.2 billion in 2022, and most of

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

that revenue comes from wine corks. Amaram alone sells around half of all

[Carlos DeJesus]

wine stoppers produced all over the world.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

So when something goes wrong, people take notice.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

What was threatening the industry is something called 2,4,6 trichloroenisole. This actually had an impact in people's lives, in jobs, in companies, in businesses.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Trichloroanisol, or tca, is the culprit behind what's commonly known as cork taint.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

It's a component that is mainly a byproduct of environmental contamination, environmental pollution, and that generates enough flavor or an off smell in cork that can ruin a bottle of wine. And for a long, long time we didn't really understand what it was.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Cork production methods in Portugal in the 80s and 90s may have compromised quality and seemed to have led to an

[Carlos DeJesus]

increase in cork taint.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

According to Wine Enthusiast magazine, by the

[Carlos DeJesus]

2000s, as many as 9.5% of wine bottles were contaminated with TCA.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Typically, rates of cork taint hover around 3%. As the problem persisted, winemakers turned to

[Carlos DeJesus]

other kinds of closures like plastic, synthetic cork and screw caps. Buyers didn't mind those alternatives, and the cork industry saw cork taint as an existential threat.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

Since we got our proverbial kick in the back from the plastics and then the screw capsule, the research and development start producing really, really interesting results.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

In 2016, Amaram unveiled a sophisticated chemical

[Carlos DeJesus]

analysis system called NDTech. It uses a process called gas chromatography to identify trace amounts of TCA in every wine cork they produce.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

So we have that system to a cutoff point of 0.5 of a nanogram. It's something like finding one drop of water in 800 Olympic sized swimming pools.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

DeJesus says ND Tech has effectively solved

[Carlos DeJesus]

Amaram's cork taint problem.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

But he knows that with nature, perfection is often elusive.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

This is the moment where the scientists will tap on my shoulder and say, remember, there's no such thing as zero in science. It's easy to fall into the temptation of promising perfection. In this world, we have a really good risk management policy and that's what we have been doing.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

But for a lot of wine drinkers,

[Carlos DeJesus]

the damage was done.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Screw caps in particular have gained in

[Carlos DeJesus]

popularity since 2000, especially for wines meant to be drunk soon after they're purchased. In the US, around 30% of bottles use screw caps. In other parts of the world, it's a lot higher.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

New Zealand would use about 95% of metal closures. Australia would be about 75, 78%. But you know what? Until the pandemic, the fastest growing market for cork anywhere in the world was actually Australia.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

If Australians don't mind drinking wine from screw capped bottles, why did they suddenly start buying more corks? It turns out that Chinese drinkers demand

[Carlos DeJesus]

wines with cork stoppers.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

China became the leading export destination for Australian wine. And if you want to sell a bottle of wine in China, it's very clear what you need to do.

[Carlos DeJesus]

There's another glaring difference between cork stoppers and other types of While screw caps

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

and less popular alternative closures like plastic and glass can be recycled, none of these alternative materials enjoy the same kind

[Carlos DeJesus]

of afterlife as cork.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

There's a handful of organizations that collect

[Carlos DeJesus]

cork for recycling, and Amaram also runs cork recycling programs around the world.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

In 2023, it collected 915 tons of

[Carlos DeJesus]

cork and turned it into all sorts of products.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

And in its second or third life,

[Carlos DeJesus]

cork still retains some value.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

The value of one ton of recycled cork can be as much as 1200-1300 a ton. Now, this is a lot more than the equivalent amount of plastic or other recycled materials that we recycle on a daily basis.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

A recycled wine cork can't be turned

[Carlos DeJesus]

into another wine cork, mostly for hygiene reasons.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Instead, it becomes flooring, construction materials, home furnishings, even insulation on rocket boosters and of course, footwear. The brand Birkenstock is famous for its

[Carlos DeJesus]

use of cork soles. DeJesus wouldn't tell us whether Amarum provides the cork for any specific brand, although

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

he did describe one big customer.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

It starts with a bee, and it's very fashionable and a lot of happy famous feet are wearing them.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

In most cases, turning trees into consumer

[Carlos DeJesus]

goods damages the climate. Trees store carbon, and removing one means more carbon in the atmosphere.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

But harvesting cork from cork oaks boosts

[Carlos DeJesus]

their carbon consumption because they absorb more CO2 as they grow back their lost bark.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

That massive amount of CO2 that Cork retains is going to be there for a longer period of time.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

And in addition to its cork recycling programs, Amaram also uses cork dust to power its factories.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

We have some cases where they operate 95% of their energy needs coming from cork dust.

[Carlos DeJesus]

It makes you wonder why we aren't planting more cork oak trees around the

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

world until you remember that it takes

[Carlos DeJesus]

several decades for a cork oak to produce a viable product.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

If I propose to any of our listeners that you know what, I have a great business idea, we're going to literally and figuratively dig a hole on the ground, pour a lot of money into it, and then we're going to cover it, lay back, and wait 43 years for this asset to start maturing and yielding something interesting. That would be a short meeting.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

So Amaram is trying to speed up

[Carlos DeJesus]

this notoriously long process.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

Two years ago, they spent $65 million

[Carlos DeJesus]

to acquire nearly 20,000 acres in Portugal.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

And on that land, they're using a

[Carlos DeJesus]

very specific irrigation method to fool the cork oaks.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

We found out that if you trick the tree into thinking that there are enough resources that the tree can grow faster, then the tree does grow faster. We have demonstrated that we can cut that down to 1012 years.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

As Amarim Cork's new trees grow and mature, the industry is looking optimistically at other emerging trends.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

Some of the best champagnes I've ever tried in my life use the traditional cork for transportation that the consumer is going to open. But before that, there is another cork being used to stop that bottle during that so called tirage part of the process. From a business point of view, of course, it means that One bottle has two stoppers instead of one.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

And DeJesus might be a bit biased, but he thinks everybody can get behind

[Carlos DeJesus]

a world with more wine corks.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

Imagine that you could run a poll around the world and ask everybody, regardless of age and gender, whatever, what do you think are the five happy sounds of humankind? I bet you that that pop on that cork will be one of them.

[Narrator (Zachary Crockett)]

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett this episode was produced by Julie Kanfer and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson.

[Portuguese Cork Expert]

There's this show on television was called Pimp My Ride or something like that. It was terrible, but I don't think that you need to pimp your wine.

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