Popping the cork for English Wine Week

English Wine Week is an event created several years ago by the English Wine Producers (the marketing arm of the English Wine industry) to promote the many varied wines made in this country. Since then, it’s steadily gained momentum and this year vineyards throughout England have opened their doors in eager anticipation of more opportunity to show off the wines they make.

As English Wine Week draws to a close, our friends at the I Love Natural Cork campaign are celebrating with a spot of home-grown bubbly. They say that niche producer Carr Taylor’s award-winning Brut 2006 is just the ticket – fresh, buttery and only £15.99; this aromatic fizz has confirmed that we really do make some exceptional wines in England.

The Carr Taylor Vineyards are in East Sussex near Hastings on a family estate of 37 acres, producing internationally acclaimed sparkling, still and fruit wines. For English Wine Week, they are offering free trails all week – with a sunny weekend ahead of us, why not go along with a picnic and enjoy their beautiful vineyard.

The I Love Natural Cork campaign is hoping to bring English vineyards like Carr Taylor on board to highlight the benefits of cork recycling to retailers in the UK. It’s a scheme that’s gathering pace; at the start of April The Savoy Hotel teamed up with Laithwaites for the campaign’s cork recycling initiative.

Cork facts

• It is a unique material harvested from Cork oaks when they are about 25 years old. After this the tree is happy to surrender its bark every nine years.
• The word ‘corked’ is an inaccurate description of wine that smells and tastes undesirable. It was invented when natural cork was the only wine closure, so all faults are commonly described as ‘corked’. In fact, there are various things that can negatively affect wine and only about 1% of wines are actually ‘corked’ or affected by the taint typically associated with wine corks (TCA) these days – well below the figure often quoted.
• Lifecycle analysis by Price Waterhouse Coopers in 2008 found that the production of some artificial stoppers emits as much as 24 times more CO₂ than the production of natural cork stoppers. The base materials for alternative stoppers constitute bauxite from open cast mining and crude oil.
• The cork oak forests of the Mediterranean Basin are known as the ‘green lung’ of Europe, absorbing up to 14 million tonnes of CO₂ every year.
• Cork oak forests help to support a host of rare and endangered animals, making them one of the world’s top ten biodiversity hotspots.
• The cork oak forests, planted on sparse soil, act as a vital barrier against encroaching desertification and intensification of forest fires.