Typically I would greet the remark that somebody had just undertaken a cork harvest in Australia with the inertia normally reserved for a visitor to Scotland who claims to have eyeballed the Loch Ness Monster. But, darn it, this time, I would have got it wrong, for a few weeks ago two Portuguese gentlemen, both with the name of Manuel and who do this sort of thing for a living, stripped the bark from half of Australia’s only genuine cork oak plantation. They’ll be back next year to finish the job. The nine hectares of cork trees today known as the Glenloch Cork Oak Plantation are found in Canberra’s Stromlo Forest, and actually constitute the only cork ‘forest’ in the Southern Hemisphere. The forest was initiated by an American, Sir Walter Burley Griffin, who some ninety years ago had the foresight to imagine that the citizens of Canberra might need something with which to seal their locally made wines, still forty years before the region’s first known vine plantings at Narrabundah. While cork oak trees are usually able to produce a first harvest at around 25 years of age, a lack of local expertise in the cork department led to the forest’s neglect and deterioration, to the point when trees were in need of being removed. In conjunction with ACT Forests and at the instigation of local winemaker Ken Helm, enter major Portuguese cork producer Amorim, which recognised the benefits of contributing its knowledge and resources to this unique project. Last May, one of Amorim’s oak experts examined the forest and suggested that some trees be removed, since the original plantings were occasionally too close. He also recommended that to bring the forest into production would require a regular harvest at nine-year intervals, beginning this year. Although most of this year’s harvest is not up to wine cork standard, there’s enough for about three to four thousand corks, with enough offcuts to satisfy the making of table mats and coasters for sale through Canberra’s steadily increasing number of small wineries. Estimates suggest that by around 2010 there will be enough cork on the trees to produce around 750,000 corks every nine years, enough to seal about 60,000 cases of regional Canberra wine.
