FREJUS, France (dpa) – Carefully, Alain Pons runs his hand over the cork-tree bark piled up high above him. Before it gets too cold, the bark harvest is being brought in in the Esterel and Maures mountains of southern France.
Thousands of the cork oaks have been cleanly skimmed of their smooth, or “female” bark, the kind preferred for processing.
“Of course the tree suffers a little bit, but it isn’t being damaged,” says Pons, a cork entrepreneur from Frejus on the Cote d’Azur coastline.
What preoccupies him more is the fact that cork-based products have become an object of “speculation” as big producers try to corner the market.
“The big processors want to swallow up the small ones,” says the businessman. He is the third generation of his family to earn a living from cork.
There was a time when the tree, with its large acorns and fissured bark, was worth little. The industry was at rock bottom in France. Until the 1950s some 5,000 tons of cork-oak bark had been harvested each year in the Maures, providing a livelihood for about 100 cork producers. But then the sector almost collapsed.
Cork specialists from Portugal and Spain produced at far cheaper prices, and then plastic stoppers began to be used in the wine industry.
A recovery has been under way over the past 10 years, and Pons, the largest cork producer in the departement of Var with annual processing of up to 2,500 tons a year, is confident that the new upsurge in demand for cork is only going to keep increasing.
“We are shifting our production elsewhere where the costs are more favourable, even to other countries,” he adds. “Cork has become something of a luxury product.
“We’ve got a boom in bottle corks, mainly for high-quality wines,” Pons says. His 15-worker company is riding a wave of demand from the new wine-producing countries like Argentina, Chile and South Africa.
The company, called Liege-Melior, is also involved in processing cork into boards and packaging materials, with annual revenues of 30 million francs (14 million dollars).
A cork oak is skinned of its bark only once every 12 years, in the period from early June to mid-August when the tree is draining its sap. Then the tree is left alone to renew its bark, meaning that this is an industry where patience is required.
For 12 months, the bark is piled up and left exposed to all weathers. A two-hour steam bath with temperatures of up to 100 degrees celsius prepares the bark for being cut into strips from which bottle corks are punched out.
In his plant, Pons can process up to one million bottle corks a day and even supply them printed with the words “Mise en bouteille au chateau” or various wine symbols. A high-tech laboratory helps him carry out tests to determine which corks are best for which kinds of wine or bottles.
“That’s what we are here for, to solve all these problems for our customers,” he says.
Pons worries that “a concentration process is now becoming apparent among the many small cork producers” and maintains: “The large companies from Spain and Portugal are trying, with speculative and dangerously high prices, to buy up the market.”
He denies that his own company is under pressure, because it has chosen the path of specialization. But the renaissance of cork in southeastern France and on the island of Corsica notwithstanding, the power brokers of this industry are sitting in Spain and Portugal.
