I do totally remember.

I remember the time when the press cried "there is no cork left on earth!!".

I remember the time when cheap wine came with plastic corks.

I remember the time when cheap wine had cork corks again.

I don't drink alcohol but I could tell you about the devastation I felt when Mtn Dew went to high fructose corn syrup.

Sure, downvote my pain, you monsters

Your corn-based pain amuses me, cretin. I'll deign some packets of cane sugar to alleviate your pathetic woes.

(Honestly, HFCS prob has wreaked legit havoc via the "death by 1000 papercuts" method.)

I am groveling in pure joy

what does HFCS have to do with the availability (or not) of cork?

This isn't reddit

You have no compassion

Tbf upvote/downvote systems are useless without context.

If it's users with similar upvote/downvote patterns as you = higher weight, then it's more effective.

happened to me when coke bought out moxie. now its bitterless hfcs trash. Devastation indeed, RIP.

I thought moxie was Orca brewing, is that who Coke bought?

idk new hampshire cans sold out to coke. pennsylvania still makes the bottled ones and i believe theyre still sugar.....but it dosent taste the same. the new hampshire product was superior. coke nerfed it to nothing.

You feel my pain, brother

I believe you. I didn’t experience the switchover, but the real sugar/original recipe “Throwback” from about a decade ago was yummy. Can’t get it anymore, though.

Pro tip: lasts longer if you mainline it

Ironically synthetic cork would be much better used in high end bottles, as you don’t have th problem of one occasionally disintegrating and ruining a bottle that’s been maturing for decades. The amount of speciality products around wine corks is prettty insane, all the various removal devices and sealers, etc. A simple, impervious (Mylar lined?) screw top would be the actual best for both practical and “archival” purposes.

Cork can be grown and harvested sustainably, as long as there are enough trees (which live ~300 years) to meet demand (cork is bark harvested like shearing sheep).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_(material)

There's not enough cork, nor will there ever be, to make a meaningful dent in total plastic consumption (in current terms).

We produce 380M tons of plastic per year. IIUC, that's about the size of the entire lumber industry - of which cork is a very small insignificant percentage.

Cork has a very small part of the planet where it grows well, and basically everything else valuable grows well there, too...

The Nanocrystalline Cellulose market will be bigger than cork by 2030 probably - and even that is 25 years away from making a real dent in plastic consumption (aggressively).

To be fair, we don't need it to overtake, or even come close to, the entire plastic industry. It'd already be nice if it, and other sustainable materials, could chip away at different uses of petroplastics.

My point is that Cork is so laughably far away from making a meaningful dent.

It's orders of magnitude away from even taking out 1%.

Would be nice if we could invent a way to produce and 3D print cork in factories.

Like artificial “meats” there’s going to be a lot of artificial things in “printing” “cork” plain old plastics might be better.

I don’t know about printing but there’s various methods for liquifying and expanding cork. E.g. spray cork insulation and moldable cork ski boot liners.

> We produce 380M tons of plastic per year. IIUC, that's about the size of the entire lumber industry - of which cork is a very small insignificant percentage.

Any material looking to fulfill that demand will start from that position; why would anyone be producing the material if they didn't already have that market? Every new thing starts from zero; plastics were at zero too, at one time.

Cork has been in use by humans for 10,000 years...

It's not a new market.

That confuses the market with the product. Oil has been used for a long time too, but the modern oil market didn't exist until the last ~~150 years. If cork became a substitute for plastics, that would be a new market.

This is great and it would be nice to see it done sustainably (and hopefully supporting small businesses to do it).

But there are risks: https://apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/10.1094/PDIS-03-16-0408-F...

Another interesting option in this realm is mycelium, which could be better scaled on an industrial level.

I, for one, welcome our industrial biological process overlords.

(Especially in the cases where it supplants the more traditional kind that involves lots of animal cruelty.)

When it comes to industrial processes, I have zero faith that a biological alternative will end up being better than synthetics, in the same way how certified organic products are still allowed to use “approved” chemicals, many of which are even more toxic or harmful than the conventional solutions they are meant to replace.

Yes, I recall this as well. It didn't pass the smell test to me - probably wineries making up a reason to justify switching to screw caps.

Especially funny given that screw caps are inherently superior in every way except for hipster signalling.

...And for plastic caps ending up in the sea for a few centuries.

I don't know about you, but most (all?) of the screw caps I've seen are metal, not plastic.

I think the parent was commenting on how screw caps were better than the plastic "cork" style as well.

For alcohol, that's true, but most cheap wines use plastic caps around here.

Here (New Zealand) all wine at all price points, have screw caps

The ones I get are aluminum with a plastic gasket. Which is less plastic than a plastic cap, but not zero.

Well, not superior in every way.

If you don't drink a lot of wine in one sitting and have bottles that have been opened, corks seem to average out to being better for re-sealing the bottle -- specifically if you're placing them horizontally, like in a wine cooler. I've found screw caps frequently tend to leak, even over a single evening. Even with the hole from the corkscrew, the cork tends to reseal better from my experience.

With that said, I am talking about actual cork and not the plastic versions; Those will seep just as bad as screw caps.

If you like wine and don't kill bottles in one sitting, I think the preferred resealing option are those rubber stoppers held in place by vacuum. Probably regardless of original packaging.

I try to avoid having bottles sit around opened, so generally when we open one, the idea is to finish it in a day or two. The vacuum stoppers are good, but honestly, it's so much simpler to just stick the original wooden cork back in, give it a good slap to make sure it's in there, and put the bottle back in the cooler until the next evening.

If I was storing opened bottles for longer than a day or two, I'd probably make heavier use of the vacuum stoppers, but I'm in that midpoint of the spectrum where I neither need the fancy tools, but still need something more than the cheap solution.

That seems reasonable to me!

> hipster

Vinophiles are now considered 'hipsters'? Is there any less hipster crowd than uber-wealthy wine collectors, a hobby dating back generations, if not centuries?

Screw caps are superior anyway. Easier to open, easier to reseal. It's good to see some reasonable good wines adopting screw tops in spite of tradition/inertia.

They are not superior. Convenient in certain circumstances, perhaps.

For example if one cannot be bothered to use, or does not have a corkscrew handy, a screw cap might be preferred for some.

I know it is difficult for most Modern Americans to use a corkscrew. Even more difficult is being able to appreciate the complexities and effort that goes into making good, traditional wine. Best to do away with tradition for the sake of convenience.

How are they inferior?

I assume the seal in screw caps is plastic which leaves micro plastics and/or PFAS behind in your drink.

The deduction is faulty.

PFAS are a specific family of chemicals unsuitable for this application.

No significant amount of microplastics is likely to develop from the mild abrasion of opening and closing a wine bottle a handful of times. And if your risk tolerance is so low that you are worried about that largely theoretical concern, you probably should not be drinking wine at all (because we have quite concrete evidence that alcohol is unhealthy -- unlike microplastics).

I would be (much) more worried about chunks of plastic getting in my wine from those fake cork products than from screw tops.

> No significant amount of microplastics is likely to develop from the mild abrasion of opening and closing a wine bottle a handful of times.

I think research has shown that simply storing acidic foods in contact with plastic causes micro plastics to release: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37343248/

Once opened, they do not reseal as well as real cork.

This isn't a huge deal, because a separate tool made specifically for resealing wine bottles is better than either. But if you don't drink a whole bottle of wine at once, and you don't have such a tool, cork reseals better.

I have a corkscrew and am adept at using it. But I'd rather not! There is no benefit to cork.

I remember there being an issue where in some parts of the world the cork quality was not sufficient for wine bottles so screw caps had become more popular. Probably for the best, screw caps really seem better for everyone.

very similar arc to "plastic bags are bad, save the trees!" -> "plastic is bad, paper is renewable!"

> very similar arc to "plastic bags are bad, save the trees!" -> "plastic is bad, paper is renewable!"

Over four decades, environmentalists have simply won the discussion. 99% of paper products made in the US are made using farmed wood. Now paper is renewable enough that I don't worry about putting it in the trash (since I know we have an incinerator).

Still uses petrochemicals for harvesting and processing, there's definitely a risk that certain kinds of tree farms are counterproductive. I don't think that's ever really broadly been the case though, it sounds like a whitepaper released by a thinktank funded by a plastic company to me. Those often get repackaged into low effort local news, it's not surprising that people get so confused.

But also environmentalists aren't the ones pushing for paper straws, it's mostly greenwashing by large corps and governments. Though from a conservation perspective, less plastic waste is probably a good thing for waterways and the life that depends on them (including us).

I suppose they are, in the sense that I would wave a magic wand that replaced plastic in all applications where it was not being used as a critical material with a more expensive but more sustainable alternative.

Straws I guess get wrapped up in that, though I'd sooner just not use a straw and don't see why that's not the default. Seems strange to me that adult humans want a goofy plastic tube in order to make drinking liquid enjoyable enough.

To me the bigger issues are single use plastic cups and bottles, to which I say elimination and alternatives like water bottles and aluminum cans, paper cups, aluminum cups (did you know you can buy aluminum solo cups?), and glassware can really meet almost every need. It's a matter of volume and pollution versus real net utility versus the technology they replace.

There's some advanced plastics and things for packaging that are cool, but they don't need to be on every single thing.

There is no reason why those plastics have to end up in waterways though

There’s a whole bunch of terrible outcomes that aren’t necessary

I was just posting in another comment that I remember all kinds of warning about the world running out of cork, which led to wines shipping with plastic or synthetic corks. The general thought, at least from the things I heard, was only really good wine had a real cork, as the cheap ones couldn’t afford it.

Hopefully this isn’t some kind of Mandela effect. I don’t think it is.