Cork is harvested primarily from the Cork Oak tree, a species of tree that grows in West Mediterranean Sea area (the greater part of cork oak forests can in fact be found in Portugal, Spain, Italian Maremma, Corsica, South France and North Africa).
Natural cork or agglomerate cork are often used in building trade, but cork's elasticity combined with its near-impermeability makes it suitable as a material for bottle stoppers, especially for high quality wine bottles. Today, the cork stoppers industry has gained 70% of the global cork market, producing about 20 mld of stoppers per year: half of them are 1-piece fine cork stoppers, suitable for high quality wine, the others are agglomerate cork stoppers for standard quality wine.
Cork can be contaminated with harmless but foul-smelling trichloroanisole (TCA), that is one of the primary causes of cork taint in wine. GEA Levati Food Tech has developed a special retort designed to sterilize corks, assuring efficiency and resistance to the tannin agent present in corks. The retort's heat treatment in fact reduces the amount of TCA to insignicant levels, that can't be perceived by the senses.
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