Cork for a long time has done a great job of sealing wine bottles. It is tradition. It pops, it breaks, we fumble with it, buy expensive contraptions to extract it, and generally associate the popping of the cork with the ceremonial of wine drinking. If the cork is moldy (the tricky part being that this type of mold is invisible), and the wine is “corked”, you are in for a big disappointment. Hold your breath, because it doesn’t smell too good. It is estimated that each year 1.4 billion bottles of wine spoiled by cork taint, reports wineman.com. Besides, you have to wait around 40 years to harvest a cork tree, and therefore you can run into all kinds of trouble with supply and demand fluctuations. So why are reputable wineries still using cork, when it proves to be such a pain? Why hasn’t science come up with the perfect alternative yet? Some experts swear by synthetic corks, and it may very well be the way of the future. Cork may be in more trouble than we knew… read Tom Wark’s analysis: