The Cork, or cork, is a soft, elastic wood with many holes in it that make it softer when soaked in water. Seventy percent of the cork is made into a wine stopper. This kind of wood is made after cutting the cork(https://www.ythongning.com/nature-cork-2-product/), again through the machine will the stopper compaction and into the bottle, and advantage of the characteristics of the elastic expansion to return to original state, thus tightly sealed the bottleneck, so as to protect the wine in the bottle does not damage of leakage. The cork has many tiny holes in the inside, which allow the wine inside to breathe and develop (very little air enters, and the wine ripeness is through the gap between the cork and the bottle, not through the inside of the cork), thus making the wine the best.
How do so many corks continue to be produced?
Cork grows in countries with Mediterranean climates, such as Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Italy, Tunisia, France, etc. It doesn’t need irrigation, it doesn’t need pruning, it doesn’t need extra fertilizer. Portugal is the largest cork producer, and cork harvesting is regulated by the government. You can’t harvest it until it’s 25 years old, but when you first harvest it’s not very good, so you can only use it to make soles and stuff, not stoppers. When the tree is 42 years old, it can be harvested as a stopper, harvested every nine years and still alive for another 170 years or more. The harvest is done by skilled workers with good wages who use small axes to slowly chip away at the bark of the tree, which does little damage to the tree.
Eventually corks began to be graded according to quality, generally based on the number of holes. White corks are usually highly valued, although some vintners prefer a darker or natural color. Women usually use a quick thinking eye to pick out the best and most attractive of the seven levels of cork. In recent years, more than three classification standards have been added, in which the vast majority of manufacturing processes are done by machines. The human eye is the key to quality, and it is this grade of cork that ends up in the container for bottling.