Agglomerated or Natural Corks?
Choosing between agglomerated and natural corks is one of the key decisions when bottling homemade wine, and this guide explains the differences so you can pick the right cork for your wine.
Now that we’ve learned everything about winemaking, it’s time to decide which cork to use to preserve your wine for that perfect occasion. But how do you make such a decision? Aren’t all corks the same? Well, you’ve come to the right place, because today with The Artisan’s Bottega you will learn all about wine corks.
A little bit of history
Corks became the sealing material for wine in the late 1600s, when it became impossible for winemakers to create glass wine bottles with a uniform shape and design, which made them difficult to seal and preserve. More than 100 years later, easy-to-use corkscrews became popular among wine lovers and tavern owners. Flash forward to the 21st century, with the technology and innovation of years and years of winemaking, and we are now able to purchase corks individually.
Corks are even designed to allow close to 1 milligram of oxygen to enter the bottle per year, which is the right amount of air to make sure that the sulphites added in the process are removed, keeping the wine fresh and tasty as we all know and love it. As you can see, corks play a starring role in the whole winemaking process, so it’s important to make informed decisions about the types of corks that exist and their benefits for your homemade wine.
For obvious reasons, we will disregard synthetic options, because we know that as a true artisan at heart you will prefer a more elaborate option. That leaves us with agglomerated and natural corks.
1. Agglomerated cork
Within the agglomerated cork bracket, you can opt for micro-agglomerated corks (with a 0.5 to 2.0mm granule size), which have the advantage of being stronger and harder wearing than standard agglomerated corks. You can then choose between extruded and moulded agglomerated corks. Extruded agglomerated corks are the cheapest cork option because they are not very strong, so they are more likely to break when uncorking a bottle and give a less reliable seal. Moulded corks (which are always micro-agglomerated) are a much higher quality option and are becoming increasingly common in the industry because they are much stronger and their reliability and consistency are much better than extruded corks, but they are twice the price of extruded corks.
2. Natural cork
Moulded agglomerated corks are increasingly taking market share from natural corks, and the simple reason is price. Natural corks are extremely complex to produce, because they have to be made from uneven cork bark and then selected and divided by quality (and then selected and divided again after treatment). They are also less easy to sterilise than agglomerated corks.
This makes good quality natural corks expensive, and there is no point pretending otherwise, but is the extra money worth it? The choice is up to you! Some of the great advantages of natural corks are:
- Their natural porosity allows a wine to age in a bottle in a way that an agglomerated cork would not.
- Agglomerated corks contain synthetic binding agents, which, although food-safe, are not ideal to have in contact with the delicate flavours that many drinks have.
- Natural cork looks beautiful and organic, whereas agglomerated cork is uniform and looks semi-synthetic.
With that being said, we can conclude that natural corks are the best closure for high quality wines and spirits, because they give a feel of quality and nature to the drinks that are bottled with them.
Put another way, you can see a natural cork as steak, compared to agglomerated corks, which are like ground beef for burgers. They both have their place in the food market, but when making the final decision between natural and agglomerated, you need to decide whether you are enjoying fast food or fine dining. Once again, the decision is yours!
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