Finished Cork Plate Debut

Well I finished that cork plate project. After writing a post about how hard it was to find real corks these days, even in Italy, the original gift-giver sent me another package from the states. This time it was full of corks her friend saved, including French and South American wines.

Although I cheated myself out of authentically showing only my own history of wine bottles that had passed through the house in my life with F, I do have a completed project in much less time.

It's definitely one big hot plate. For now, I have it hanging on the kitchen wall.

The Unfinished Cork Project

Shortly after throwing away a bag full of supposedly useless wine corks, I received a gift in the mail: a wooden frame to use to make a big cork hot plate. The idea is that you fill in the center area with all the corks you would otherwise throw away and have a unique hot plate to show for it.

That was 2 (or even 3?) years ago. I don't remember exactly. I started to collect the corks again. But in the meantime the wine industry changed gears. It stopped making wine stoppers out of cork, using a plastic substitute instead. Perhaps it was for environmental reasons, like saving the cork trees from over harvesting. Or maybe the aziende agrigole realized that there was no risk is selling a bad bottle that tasted like cork without real cork stoppers. Anyway, the fact remains that it has become virtually impossible to regularly find real cork, even in Italy.

This is a picture of the state of my cork project:

I buy wine. I live in Italy, so I often drink wine. I like a glass at dinner. But here I am with only these corks to count after all these years! I need double that to finish the plate! I even thought of asking a café or enoteca (wine shop) owner to pass on some of her stoppers to speed up the process, but then my plate would lack my own history in its completion. I want to know I actually drank those different wines featured by the corks. I also want to see the visual variety of the various brands. The enoteca owner will probably just give me dozens of corks from the same brands of tocai and merlot (popular regional choices).

The funny thing is that now a new labor protest in going on, led by the cork peelers. These people are losing their jobs because of the drop in worldwide cork sales. The country of Portugal claims part of its bad economy on the drop in this single field! Now the workers are campaigning to get the wine industry to start using the real stuff again, claiming that it is environmentally better because it's natural. But is it sustainable?

In Italy, Sardegna's the largest cork producer. I haven't seen any Sardinian cork protesters picketing during this crisis season, but they are probably suffering, too.

So is topping bottles with cork good or bad for the environment? I'm confused.

What's your opinion?

It's just such a great material: soft yet hard, light, solid yet airy, and heat-resistant, best of all.

Read and watch more about the cork scene at Time magazine and at Sughero Naturale.

A Special Birthday Gift

I wish I had a birthday gift like hers when I was her age. I am talking about a 13-year-old whose father finances a trip to any country in the world for each of his children on that special birthday.

I met this father-daughter duo from North Carolina at the Rifugio Città di Fiume on Mount Pelmo last week.

I rarely hear American accents while hiking in the Dolomites, so I usually introduce myself out of curiosity. In this manner, I was told the reason for this American couple's visit to Italy. The father's pact is on condition that there is some sort of "adventure" involved in the trip to the child's country of choice. The young blond teenager chose Italy and I was meeting them on the adventure leg of the journey. They had started in Venice for 3 days, followed by 6 days of continuous hiking in alta quota and would finish with 5 days in Rome, possibly hitting Pompei before returning back to the US.

I was amazed at the magnitude of this amazing birthday present. Of course, the father got some fun out of the deal, too.

I remember that I was thrilled to get to go to the Rockies for a week, compliments of my Girl Scout troop when I was that age. My leader promised her girls a trip to anywhere (in the US) if they stayed in Girl Scouts beyond the age of 13. (At that point in teenage life, it becomes quite unpopular to be a Girl Scout.) Her family's company donated to help pay for the trip. We all thought we were the luckiest East Coast girls to see the mountains out West! But that must have been how things were 20 years ago in the US. Now it's Europe on the youngster's minds!