Narrator: This is where the best corks in the world come from: the bark of a cork oak tree. Harvesting it takes precision and years of experience to master. Any cut that's too deep could damage or kill the trees, and most of these are over 100 years old. Nuno: Our main goal is to keep the tree alive for as many years as possible. Narrator: More than half of the world's cork comes from Portugal, and most of the country's production comes from just one family-owned business called Corticeira Amorim. The 150-year-old firm uses cork in all kinds of products, even rockets. But just two decades ago, the industry nearly collapsed when a fungus in cork ruined the smell and taste of millions of bottles of wine. So what is this company and the industry doing to avoid another crisis? And why is harvesting cork such a tough job? The cork oak forests in Portugal have been protected under law for over 800 years.

Unlike most commercial trees, cork oaks are never cut down and are only harvested for their outer bark. Nuno: You have to respect the tree in the first place. So you have a certain moment in time where you are allowed to make the harvest. Narrator: Harvesters need to follow strict rules to keep trees in good health. The trees can't be harvested until they're 25 years old and 70 centimeters in diameter. After that, they can only be stripped every nine years, so the bark has enough time to grow back. And since the first two harvests don't produce the best cork, workers have to wait more than 40 years to get the good stuff. Because every tree and branch are different, stripping can't be done by large machines, and it can only happen during the hot summer months. Workers like Casimiro have to harvest them when the trees are most actively growing. Narrator: Harvesters make about $900 a week,

about five times more than the average agricultural worker in Portugal. Narrator: But finding people interested in learning the craft has become harder. So in 2020, the company started slowly integrating custom tools to make harvesting faster while still preserving the trees. Like this small saw workers sometimes use to make the first cut. It has a special sensor that detects humidity and retracts before cutting too deep. And these clippers help open up the bark. Narrator: Then, workers peel the rest using axes that are specially designed for this job. The short handle and curved edge make stripping the bark easier. These strikes need to be precise. Any cut to the inner layers could expose the tree to infection or kill it. Narrator: Workers paint the trunks with a number from zero to nine, indicating the year the tree was last harvested. A four means it was harvested in 2024. Cork trees can live up to 250 years, and, with proper care, regenerate bark their entire lives.

The Whistler Tree, at 240, is the oldest on record, and it's been harvested more than 20 times. Workers load the carved bark onto trucks and deliver it to Amorim's factory, which processes about 5,000 metric tons of cork bark a month. There, the planks are flattened between concrete blocks to dry out. After six months, workers boil them in water for an hour to soften them. The planks sit to dry again for a few days before they're ready for processing. Cork harvesting goes back 5,000 years. Egyptians used stoppers to seal jugs and tombs, and the Romans used cork in shoes and floats for fishing nets. The Romans and the ancient Greeks also used them to seal large clay jars, some containing wine. In the 1600s, England introduced stronger glass bottles to store wine and beer and started sealing them with corks. But it wasn't until the French Champagne producer

Dom Pérignon switched to cork in the late 17th century. That sealing wine with corks became widespread. In Portugal, by the end of the 1700s, only small workshops in places like Lisbon made wine stoppers. But it wasn't big business here yet, and most of the country's cork bark was exported to France and Spain for processing. Portugal has always been the biggest cork producer in the world, not necessarily the biggest cork manufacturer in the world. And that's basically what our family has changed. Narrator: In 1870, António's great-grandfather, who was also called António, founded Amorim in a small workshop outside Porto. Like Portuguese cork in general, the company grew steadily over the next 50 years. They processed stoppers locally and sold them directly to vineyards. The family built their first big factory in 1922. The same year, Portugal's cork exports doubled.

compared to the year before. In 1980, Portugal was the largest importer and exporter of cork, with Amorim claiming to process the most by the end of the decade. I think that we have in common a true passion for the product that we work with, cork. And that basically has kept the family very, very much connected with this business. Narrator: Today, the company is the world's largest supplier of cork wine stoppers. At Amorim's facility in Santa Maria da Feira, people work side by side with machines to maximize the amount of material they can process. Workers start by sorting the planks by hand and inspecting them for thickness and quality. Only the highest-quality pieces are used to make natural hole-punched stoppers. Imperfect bark is ground down to be used as a composite material for other products. More on that in a bit. The ideal piece has small pores and a good moisture level.

Less than half of the harvested bark passes this test. Workers use their hands and feet to punch the stoppers out of the bark. Most of them can punch about 14,000 stoppers over their eight-hour shift. In 2014, the company started using robotic arms to speed up the process, along with automatic drillers that can now punch out about 35,000 a day. A series of imagers, like this X-ray machine, categorizes the stoppers based on quality, while another machine separates them using bursts of air. Finally, the stoppers are branded and personalized before they're shipped to more than 100 countries. In 2023, Amorim produced about 22 million stoppers a day. Cork makes such good wine stoppers because of its low porosity, which allows just the right amount of oxygen to pass through so the wine can develop complex flavors and aromas over time. 60% to 70% of the cellular structure of the cork is air.

That makes it a very light material, a very compressible material, that makes a fantastic insulator, that makes it really be impermeable to gases and liquids. Narrator: These days, stoppers drive about three-quarters of Amorim's business. But in the early 2000s, the entire cork stopper industry almost collapsed. Cork bark naturally hosts fungi, but when certain types are exposed to chemicals in production, like chlorine, it kick-starts a process that creates TCA, a chemical compound that ruins wine, making it taste musty and moldy. And it's sometimes called cork taint. An outbreak of sorts started in the late 1990s, with around 5% to 10% of all wines sold tainted. Frustrated winemakers began looking for alternative closures, turning to plastic and aluminum screw tops. And the value of cork plummeted. By 2011, winemakers in New Zealand

and Australia had largely ditched cork in favor of screw tops. And half of the wine in the US was also using alternative closures. To save its business, Amorim invested hundreds of millions of euros in a research and development lab that could help the company screen and eliminate TCA. And it paid off. By 2015, less than 1% of the corks leaving Amorim had TCA. No war is won ever, but some battles have been gained. Narrator: The lab also developed new products that could be made with bark unsuitable for high-quality stoppers. António: There are endless uses for cork. We continue research on what else can we do with cork that we have not done until now. Narrator: Amorim now uses all of its by-products and cutoffs from the stopper process to make coasters, toys, and sheets. The word waste is not applicable to our industry.

Here, we only talk about raw material. Even the dust or powder that might be generated from the production process, we use as biomass for our boiling systems. So, 70% of our energy use comes from our own biomass. Narrator: And since 2008, Amorim's been buying used cork from supermarkets, turning that into new products, too. The company recycles about 200 million stoppers a year using a pretty simple process. The corks are loaded into a hopper and crushed into granules that can be used to make coasters, bricks, and other types of composite. António: We don't have so many industries in the world that can produce physically those many pieces. Narrator: The only thing they can't be used for is high-quality stoppers. A new growing area for the business is cork flooring. Because cork trees don't have to be cut down, the material offers an environmentally friendly alternative.

to hardwood. Thin sheets of composite made from ground bark are run through printers and lasers, which color and etch them with knots and grain. Workers inspect the sheets by hand and use tools to measure the consistency of gloss, color, and varnish. Today, Amorim sells its flooring to 80 countries. But perhaps the most exciting development is sending cork to space. Because it's a great insulator and lightweight, the material has been used in aeronautics since World War II. NASA started using it to make heat shields in the early 1960s. Today, both NASA and the European Space Agency source their cork from Amorim. António: I think the aerospace is probably the one that we'll be most proud of, because a natural material that has ticked all the NASA boxes on thermal shield insulation performance. Narrator: Meanwhile, natural cork is also having a resurgence, in part because it's a renewable resource,

decomposes naturally and can be made into a range of products. With new technologies and new international customers, the Portuguese cork industry reached an all-time sales high of $1.3 billion in 2023. But making all these products depends on healthy, growing forests. Many of the trees Amorim harvests are over 100 years old, now living on less rainfall and warmer temperatures. All of these trees will die at a certain moment in time, and we don't have the baby trees coming up. So we need to plant more. Narrator: Since 2023, Amorim has planted 300,000 trees. They plan to plant another 1.5 million in the next five years. The company monitors them closely, trying to identify which grow the fastest while resisting disease and drought. Nuno: As soon as we find these champion trees, we need to multiply them and to make them available for the forest landowners to plant them in their fields.

This is how committed we are to our industry. Because the payback of this investment will be close to 24 years' time. Narrator: António is confident that, after surviving world wars, heat waves, and weird smells, his company is well-positioned to continue to adapt. António: Amorim has been growing as a company for over 154 years of its existence. Today, we have basically reached the peak of the company, but we believe that we still can grow much further in the future.

How The World's Largest Cork Company Makes 22 Million Wine Stoppers A Day | Big Business

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