The Portuguese company Corticeira Amorim is the world's largest producer and distributor of cork. For 150 years, the company has expanded the Portuguese cork industry, but 20 years ago, the entire cork-wine-stopper industry was nearly ruined by fungi. We visited Amorim's headquarters to see how the company has combined traditional techniques and new technologies to save its business while exploring new uses for one of the world’s most versatile materials.
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00:00This is where the best corks in the world come from, the bark of a cork oak tree.
00:08Harvesting it takes precision and years of experience to master.
00:16Any cut that's too deep could damage or kill the trees, and most of these are over
00:20one hundred years old.
00:22Our main goal is to keep the tree alive for as many years as possible.
00:30More than half of the world's cork comes from Portugal, and most of the country's production
00:35comes from just one family-owned business called Coriceira Amorim.
00:40The 150-year-old firm uses cork in all kinds of products, even rockets.
00:47But just two decades ago, the industry nearly collapsed when a fungus in cork ruined the
00:52smell and taste of millions of bottles of wine.
00:58So what is this company, and the industry, doing to avoid another crisis?
01:02And why is harvesting cork such a tough job?
01:09The cork oak forests in Portugal have been protected under law for over 800 years.
01:15Unlike most commercial trees, cork oaks are never cut down and are only harvested for
01:19their outer bark.
01:21You have to respect the tree in the first place, so you have a certain moment in time
01:27where you are allowed to make the harvest.
01:31Harvesters need to follow strict rules to keep trees in good health.
01:34The trees can't be harvested until they're 25 years old and 70 centimeters in diameter.
01:40After that, they can only be stripped every nine years so the bark has enough time to
01:44grow back.
01:45And since the first two harvests don't produce the best cork, workers have to wait more than
01:4940 years to get the good stuff.
01:52Because every tree and branch are different, stripping can't be done by large machines.
01:57And it can only happen during the hot summer months.
02:01Workers like Casmiro have to harvest then, when the trees are most actively growing.
02:10Harvesters make about $900 a week, about five times more than the average agricultural worker
02:14in Portugal.
02:15It's hard work, but in the end, we see money at the end of the week or the end of the month.
02:22It's rewarding for us.
02:24But finding people interested in learning the craft has become harder.
02:28So in 2020, the company started slowly integrating custom tools to make harvesting faster while
02:34still preserving the trees.
02:37Like this small saw workers sometimes use to make the first cut, it has a special sensor
02:41that detects humidity and retracts before cutting too deep.
02:46And these clippers help open up the bark.
02:58Then workers peel the rest using axes that are specially designed for this job.
03:02The short handle and curved edge make stripping the bark easier.
03:06These strikes need to be precise.
03:08Any cut to the inner layers could expose the tree to infection or kill it.
03:18Workers paint the trunks with a number from zero to nine, indicating the year the tree
03:22was last harvested.
03:23A four means it was harvested in 2024.
03:27Cork trees can live up to 250 years and with proper care, regenerate bark their entire
03:32lives.
03:34The Whistler tree at 240 is the oldest on record, and it's been harvested more than
03:3920 times.
03:42Workers load the carved bark onto trucks and deliver it to Amarim's factory, which processes
03:47about 5,000 metric tons of cork bark a month.
03:51There, the planks are flattened between concrete blocks to dry out.
03:55After six months, workers boil them in water for an hour to soften them.
03:59The planks sit to dry again for a few days before they're ready for processing.
04:04Cork harvesting goes back 5,000 years.
04:06Egyptians used stoppers to seal jugs in tombs, and the Romans used cork in shoes and floats
04:11for fishing nets.
04:12The Romans and the ancient Greeks also used them to seal large clay jars, some containing
04:18wine.
04:19In the 1600s, England introduced stronger glass bottles to store wine and beer and started
04:25sealing them with corks.
04:27But it wasn't until the French champagne producer Dom Perignon switched to cork in the late
04:3117th century that sealing wine with corks became widespread.
04:35In Portugal, by the end of the 1700s, only small workshops in places like Lisbon made
04:40wine stoppers.
04:42But it wasn't big business here yet, and most of the country's cork bark was exported to
04:46France and Spain for processing.
04:48Portugal has always been the biggest cork producer in the world.
04:53Not necessarily the biggest cork manufacturer in the world, and that's basically what our
04:57family has changed.
04:59In 1870, Antonio's great-grandfather, who was also called Antonio, founded Amorim in
05:04a small workshop outside Porto.
05:07Like Portuguese cork in general, the company grew steadily over the next 50 years.
05:12They processed stoppers locally and sold them directly to vineyards.
05:15The family built their first big factory in 1922, the same year Portugal's cork exports
05:21doubled compared to the year before.
05:23In 1980, Portugal was the largest importer and exporter of cork, with Amorim claiming
05:29to process the most by the end of the decade.
05:31I think that we have in common a true passion for the product that we work with, cork, and
05:40that basically has kept the family very, very much connected with this business.
05:45Today, the company is the world's largest supplier of cork wine stoppers.
05:51In Amorim's facility in Santa Maria da Feira, people work side-by-side with machines to
05:56maximize the amount of material they can process.
06:00Workers start by sorting the planks by hand and inspecting them for thickness and quality.
06:06Only the highest-quality pieces are used to make natural, hole-punched stoppers.
06:11Imperfect bark is ground down to be used as a composite material for other products.
06:15More on that in a bit.
06:17The ideal piece has small pores and a good moisture level.
06:20Less than half of the harvested bark passes this test.
06:25Workers use their hands and feet to punch the stoppers out of the bark.
06:30Most of them can punch about 14,000 stoppers over their eight-hour shift.
06:34In 2014, the company started using robotic arms to speed up the process, along with automatic
06:41drillers that can now punch out about 35,000 a day.
06:45A series of imagers, like this x-ray machine, categorizes the stoppers based on quality,
06:51while another machine separates them using bursts of air.
06:54Finally, the stoppers are branded and personalized before they're shipped to more than 100 countries.
07:00In 2023, Amorim produced about 22 million stoppers a day.
07:05Cork makes such good wine stoppers because of its low porosity, which allows just the
07:10right amount of oxygen to pass through so the wine can develop complex flavors and aromas
07:15over time.
07:1660 to 70 percent of the cellar structure of the cork is air.
07:21That makes it a very light material, a very compressible material.
07:25That makes a fantastic insulator.
07:28That makes it really be impermeable to gases and liquids.
07:33These days, stoppers drive about three-quarters of Amorim's business, but in the early 2000s,
07:38the entire cork stopper industry almost collapsed.
07:43Cork bark naturally hosts fungi.
07:45But when certain types are exposed to chemicals in production, like chlorine, it kick-starts
07:50a process that creates TCA, a chemical compound that ruins wine, making it taste musty and
07:56moldy.
07:57And it's sometimes called cork taint.
08:00An outbreak of sorts started in the late 1990s, with around 5 to 10 percent of all wines sold
08:06tainted.
08:07Frustrated winemakers began looking for alternative closures, turning to plastic and aluminum
08:13screw tops.
08:14And the value of cork plummeted.
08:17By 2011, winemakers in New Zealand and Australia had largely ditched cork in favor of screw
08:22tops.
08:23And half of the wine in the U.S. was also using alternative closures.
08:29To save its business, Amorim invested hundreds of millions of euros in a research and development
08:34lab that could help the company screen and eliminate TCA.
08:38And it paid off.
08:39By 2015, less than one percent of the corks leaving Amorim had TCA.
08:43No war is won ever, but some battles have been gained.
08:48The lab also developed new products that could be made with bark unsuitable for high-quality
08:54stoppers.
08:55There are endless uses for cork.
08:57We continue research on what else can we do with cork that we have not done until now.
09:02Amorim now uses all of its by-products and cut-offs from the stopper process to make
09:06coasters, toys, and sheets.
09:10The word waste is not applicable to our industry.
09:14Here, we only talk about raw material.
09:17Even the dust or powder that might be generated from the production process, we use as biomass
09:25for our boiling systems.
09:28So 70 percent of our energy uses comes from our own biomass.
09:36And since 2008, Amorim's been buying used cork from supermarkets, turning that into
09:41new products, too.
09:42The company recycles about 200 million stoppers a year using a pretty simple process.
09:47The corks are loaded into a hopper and crushed into granules that can be used to make coasters,
09:54bricks, and other types of composite.
09:57We don't have so many industries in the world that can produce physically those many pieces.
10:04The only thing they can't be used for is high-quality stoppers.
10:08A new, growing area for the business is cork flooring.
10:13Because cork trees don't have to be cut down, the material offers an environmentally friendly
10:16alternative to hardwood.
10:18Thin sheets of composite made from ground bark are run through printers and lasers,
10:23which color and etch them with knots and grain.
10:26Workers inspect the sheets by hand and use tools to measure the consistency of gloss,
10:31color, and varnish.
10:33Today, Amorim sells its flooring to 80 countries.
10:36But perhaps the most exciting development is sending cork to space.
10:46Because it's a great insulator and lightweight, the material has been used in aeronautics
10:51since World War II.
10:53NASA started using it to make heat shields in the early 1960s.
10:58Today, both NASA and the European Space Agency source their cork from Amorim.
11:03I think the aerospace is probably the one that we'll be most proud of, because a natural
11:07material that has ticked all the NASA boxes on thermal shield insulation performance.
11:18Meanwhile, natural cork is also having a resurgence, in part because it's a renewable resource,
11:26decomposes naturally, and can be made into a range of products.
11:29With new technologies and new international customers, the Portuguese cork industry reached
11:34an all-time sales high of $1.3 billion in 2023.
11:40But making all these products depends on healthy, growing forests.
11:44Many of the trees Amorim harvests are over 100 years old, now living on less rainfall
11:49and warmer temperatures.
11:51All of these trees will die at a certain moment in time, and we don't have the baby trees
11:56coming up.
11:58So we need to plant more.
12:00Since 2023, Amorim has planted 300,000 trees.
12:04They plan to plant another 1.5 million in the next five years.
12:09The company monitors them closely, trying to identify which grow the fastest while resisting
12:14disease and drought.
12:15As soon as we find these champion trees, we need to multiply them and to make them available
12:22for the forest landowners to plant them in their fields.
12:26This is how committed we are to our industry, because the payback of this investment will
12:30be close to 24 years' time.
12:34Antonio is confident that after surviving world wars, heatwaves, and weird smells, his
12:39company is well-positioned to continue to adapt.
12:42Amorim has been growing as a company for over 154 years of its existence.
12:48Today we are basically at the peak of the company, but we believe that we still can
12:53grow much further in the future.