At Tinto Figuero we understand that our wines are natural products, the result of manual work and traditional aging. They are wines that never stop evolving, which is why they need time in the bottle to round off and find their own balance, to reach their maximum expression and become a superior quality wine.
Part of our job is to provide you with the perfect travel companions such as glass and natural cork.
Since when do wine, glass and cork travel together?
The tandem wine, glass and cork originated millions of years ago. In ancient times, the Greeks and Romans used corks to close their amphorae, however, with the rise of wooden barrels, the use of cork was lost giving way to wooden stoppers.
Over time, the wine has changed its container until it has reached glass bottles, first for service and later for storage. It was in this last stage in the 17th century that Dom Pierre Pérignon, a French Benedictine monk, considered what the best closure for these bottles was.
The story goes that during one of his pilgrimages he was able to observe how the pilgrims closed their vessels with corks in an almost hermetic way, so that he began to study the benefits of cork, reopening a world before our eyes.
What is cork? Where does it come from?
Cork is a completely natural raw material extracted from the bark of the cork oak (Querqus Suber) and its unique properties give it unprecedented qualities. It is light, impermeable to liquids and gases, elastic, compressible, etc. In addition, it is completely biodegradable, renewable and recyclable, being very useful for preserving natural habitats, indigenous populations and biodiversity.
The cork has the ability to let the wine breathe, leaving the container that contains it airtight.
It is a sustainable material, it is not necessary to cut the cork oak, but it regenerates autonomously. The most interesting thing is that to make cork, the cork oak needs to absorb a lot of CO2 through photosynthesis. This means that corks can offset the carbon footprint of 75 cl glass bottles, which release between three and five hundred grams of CO2 each, depending on their weight.
What types of cork do we use at Tinto Figuero?
Natural cork
Natural corks are extracted from the cork oak from a single strip. In this way, an optimal seal is guaranteed, allowing the correct evolution of the wines through micro-oxygenation.
At Tinto Figuero we work exclusively with natural corks for different reasons:
We produce red wines with aging, designed to endure over time.
We believe in the evolution of our wines in the bottle, so we must provide you with a colleague of the highest quality.
Working with natural cork we avoid aromas foreign to the wine.
We use TCA-free natural corks in our great wines to ensure that it arrives in perfect condition at the table.
Why smell the cork before tasting a wine?
If we stop to analyze a natural cork, we can see the manufacturer’s seal, its porosity and elasticity, and its stain. But the way to understand all these variables is to contextualize them.
Just as a young wine will have different aromatic and visual nuances than a wine that is aged, the same thing will happen with the cork. The visual phase of a tasting predisposes us to a situation that the nose will reveal to us later.
That is why when opening a bottle of wine you should smell the cork. The most important thing is to find clean aromas typical of the wine. The varietal aromas that we will find in a Tinto Figuero will be black fruits, liquorice, sweet spices.
But what aromas tell us that something is not right? All those memories of humidity, fungus or even mushroom. In this situation we can find ourselves facing a guard or TCA problem.
