What is better for the environment, cork wine stoppers, or plastic or screw tops?
— Susan Wolniakowski, Duluth, MN Though you might be surprised, natural cork wine stoppers are the best choice, primarily because harvesting the real stuff is an age-old practice that keeps the world’s relatively small population of cork oak trees, which can live for hundreds of years, alive. These scattered pockets of cork oaks, mostly in Portugal and Spain, thrive in the hot, arid conditions of the southern Mediterranean, sheltering a wide array of biodiversity and helping to protect the soil from drying out. In addition, some wildlife depends upon cork oak forests for their survival, including the Iberian lynx, the Barbary deer and the Egyptian mongoose, as well as rare birds such as the Imperial Iberian eagle and the black stork. As wine producers switch to other types of wine stoppers, the cork oak forests could be abandoned and the trees and the myriad plants and animals that depend on them could die out. While 70 percent of wine bottles still contain natural cork stoppers, plas
