(We’re talking wine, not the future of the planet)
By George Kassianos
I HAVE seen the potential saviour of the cork industry, and at first sight, well, let’s just say I think it needs a little time yet.
Deep within the bowels of one of the biggest cork factories in the world, Anorim’s plant in the northern Portuguese town of Santa Maria de Lamas, sits a strange contraption that looks like one of those Heath Robinson creations from the Great Egg Race.
It consists of a blue plastic barrel with a piece of cardboard taped on top as a cover and a piece of tubing sticking out of one side which leads to a small electrical box. It could easily be mistaken for a bizarre home-brew kit gone wrong, but this is the prototype of the ozone treatment technique whose patent was purchased by the company over six years ago. The reason — to end TCA.
First, what is TCA? TCA stands for trichloroanisole and is most usually, though not always, caused by a tainted cork. If you smell this disgusting aroma of mould or rot in your glass in a restaurant you should send back the wine and ask for another bottle.
I first heard about ozone treatment in the late nineties. And I have asked the big question — is this a breakthrough or just another bit of spin-doctoring by a clever PR department? Curiosity made me dip further and discover there was indeed a story hiding away, thanks to an article in a wine magazine.
Over a decade ago, the Portuguese winemaker José Maria Neiva started some experiments with ozone. He believed that solving the TCA problem was actually an issue of disinfecting, not cleaning, the cork, and disinfecting with gas would be much better than with a liquid because it would permeate into all parts of the cork.
The role of ozone as a steriliser is not that new a concept. It has been used in hospitals, in water treatment plants and even in wineries in the US to clean equipment and surfaces. So why not in corks?
Neiva’s theory was simple. If you could remove all traces of fungus from the cork using ozone (a super-oxidant that is easy and cheap to produce) then surely you could remove the medium through which TCA is created? Sounds far too simple, but aren’t the best ideas invariably simple?
Neiva did his tests (over six years and millions of corks) and having recorded no incidence of cork taint, registered a patent and sold it to Anorim (making sure his own continued use of the treatment was written into the contract).
According to the article, he bought a nice house and a nice car on the proceeds of his invention, and thought he would have nothing more to do (apart perhaps from receiving the odd accolade from wine consumers for saving them from the odorous effects of an unpronounceable chemical).
So what went wrong? Why is that after eight years Anorim have got no further than the plastic barrel with the tube and the electrical box? The problem has been converting the system to cope with billions rather than millions of corks.
Internal disagreements — some of Anorim’s engineers did not believe in it ? have severely delayed progress and trials in the US with liquid ozone have run into problems. Apparently, someone forgot that ozone’s oxidative properties make it a very good corrosive as well as sterilising agent, and the equipment seized up after a couple of efforts.
Being a firm believer in the process and upset that his system is still not much further than the drawing board, Neiva has since attempted to buy back the patent from Anorim, which ? unsurprisingly ? turned down the offer. The company is now putting stronger efforts into reaping the rewards of its patent investment.
But is ozone the solution? Are Neiva’s trials conclusive evidence that this environmentally friendly gas can eradicate the chances of TCA infection?
If, as the corks industry attests, TCA is a universal pollutant, could there not be a risk that an ozone-treated cork might pick up TCA later in a TCA wine perhaps? Neiva insists that once sterilised by ozone there is no chance of a cork picking up fungus later on, but it would appear some people in the wine industry are less easily persuaded.
I believe the jury is out until we get some more information – I am afraid it is a case of watch this space.
On a final note, if ozone is so easy and cheap to produce, can’t someone come up with a way of using this man-made staff to plug the ozone hole in the atmosphere? After all, earth’s survival is a tad more serious than whether one’s Bordeaux is musty.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
