RIO FRIO, Portugal (AP) — U.S. winemakers have one thing to have a good time: the corks they’re popping aren’t topic to tariffs.
Cork comes from the spongy bark of the cork oak tree, which is primarily grown and harvested in the Mediterranean basin. The framework commerce settlement between the US and the European Union singled out the fabric as an “unavailable natural product.” In order of Sept. 1, cork joined a handful of different objects, together with airplanes and generic prescription drugs, which are exempt from a 15% U.S. tariff on most EU merchandise.
The cork carve-out was very important for Portugal.
The European nation is the world’s largest cork producer, accounting for about half of worldwide manufacturing.
Portuguese diplomats lobbied for the exemption on each side of the Atlantic. Patrick Spencer, the manager director of the U.S.-based Pure Cork Council, raced from Salem, Oregon, to Washington in June to elucidate cork’s origins to U.S. commerce officers and to hunt a tariff reprieve.
The Wine Institute, which represents California vintners, stated it additionally pushed for the particular dispensation.
Spencer stated he was thrilled when a abstract of the U.S.-EU settlement launched in August talked about cork.
“It was a great day in our neighborhood,” stated Spencer, a self-described “cork dork.”
Greater than cork
It’s unclear if cork is exclusive or if different pure merchandise might be exempt from U.S. tariffs in future commerce agreements. The U.S. Division of Commerce and the White Home didn’t reply when The Related Press requested about tariff exemptions.
It’s not even clear if the tariffs President Donald Trump placed on imports from the EU’s 27 member nations and virtually each nation will stay. Late final month, a U.S. appeals courtroom dominated that Trump had no proper to impose his sweeping tariffs, though it left them in place whereas his administration appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court docket.
But when the tariffs keep in place, cork could sign different exemptions to come back. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick indicated throughout a July interview with CNBC that pure merchandise like mangoes or cocoa could also be free from tariffs
U.S. dependence
The U.S. is the second-largest marketplace for Portuguese cork after France. In 2023, the U.S. imported $241 million value of cork from Portugal; simply over 70% of it got here within the type of stoppers for wine, spirits, olive oil, honey and different liquids, in accordance with the Pure Cork Council, a commerce group.
Cork has different functions, too. NASA and SpaceX have used it for thermal safety on rockets. Cork crumbles are additionally used as infill for sports activities fields and inserted into concrete on airport runways to assist take up the shock of aircraft landings.
Despite the fact that California has an identical local weather to the Mediterranean, the U.S. has by no means developed a cork trade. There was an try to start out one throughout World Warfare II, and round 500 cork oaks from that interval stay on the campus of the College of California, Davis.
However the effort evaporated when the warfare ended. The issue: it takes 25 years for a cork tree to provide its first bark for harvesting, and the preliminary yield sometimes isn’t prime quality. After that, it takes the tree about 9 years to develop new bark.
“Americans are not patient enough to wait for a tree that takes 25 years to give its first harvest,” stated Antonio Amorim, the chairman and CEO of Portugal’s Corticeira Amorim, one of many world’s largest cork firms.
Cork harvesting can be an especially specialised talent, since reducing right into a tree the incorrect means might kill it. Cork harvesters are the best paid agricultural employees in Europe, Spencer stated.
Harvesting by hand
Amorim, which exports cork to greater than 100 international locations, has greater than 20 million cork timber unfold over 700,000 hectares (1.7 million acres) of woodland.
On a latest day at Amorim’s Herdade de Rio Frio, a farm 40 kilometers (25 miles) southeast of Lisbon, crews zig-zagged throughout the skinny, pale grass between scattered cork timber, kicking up mud.
The quiet woodland echoed with the mild thud of the employees’ axes. They gently pierced the bark, feeling for the thickness of cork that might be peeled off with out harming the trunk. The Portuguese have harvested cork this manner for greater than 200 years.
The tree bark got here off in featherweight slabs that the employees, their palms black from the oaks’ pure tannins, tossed onto a flatbed truck. It will go to factories to be reduce into strips and fed right into a machine that punches out stoppers.
As soon as the timber have been naked, a lady painted a white “5” on the orange-colored trunks, signaling they have been stripped in 2025. Herdade de Rio Frio’s cork oaks, that are native to Portugal and might resist frequent droughts and scorching summer time temperatures, have been planted greater than 100 years in the past.
Stick a cork in it
Cork’s sustainable harvesting course of and its biodegradability are two causes many U.S. winemakers have returned to plugging bottles with it after experimenting with closures made from aluminum, plastic and glass. In 2010, 53% of premium U.S. wines used cork stoppers; by 2022, that had risen to 64.5%, in accordance with the Pure Cork Council.
Cork taint, which supplies wine a cool style and is attributable to a fungus in pure corks, was an enormous drawback within the Nineteen Nineties, and it pushed many vintners into aluminum screw caps and different closures, stated Andrew Waterhouse, a chemist and director of the Robert Mondavi Institute of Wine and Meals Science on the College of California, Davis.
The cork trade has largely solved that drawback, Waterhouse stated. Within the meantime, the wine trade got here up with new know-how, like screw caps that may mimic cork within the quantity of oxygen they let right into a bottle over time.
Many wineries, together with Trump Vineyard in Virginia, now use each screw caps and pure corks. Waterhouse stated screw caps usually make extra sense for a wine like rosé, which isn’t supposed to age, whereas cork is the usual for getting older wines.
“If you say, ‘Has this wine aged properly?,’ what you mean is, ‘Was it in a glass bottle with a cork seal in a cool cellar?’ Under any other conditions, it didn’t age the same,” Waterhouse stated. “We’re always trapped by history.”
Durbin reported from Detroit.
