Do corks for bottles have a direction?

October 10, 2012 1:17 PM

When wine bottle corks are cut from the cork bark, is the cork cut vertically or horizontally through the section of bark? In other words, is there 'grain' directionality in the cork bark that matters in terms of it's function as a wine bottle cork?
posted by Jackson to technology (6 answers total)

According to this it's vertically.
posted by griphus at 1:18 PM on October 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

Ooh, did you see this post? How cork is made - An illustrated guide to the cork production process
posted by Yellow at 1:26 PM on October 10, 2012 [3 favorites]

Since cork is bark and appears to grow outward from the trunk, any possible grain would be parallel to the surface of the tree. But it doesn't appear to have grain.
posted by Sunburnt at 1:51 PM on October 10, 2012

Traditional wine corks and other cork stoppers aren't made from the cork that grows on the tree as it grows up from a sapling because that cork is like the cork of other trees (ridged and very uneven in depth, albeit thicker), and so useless for the purpose.

Wine corks are made from "reproduction cork" which grows on cork oaks when the original bark is stripped off.

Reproduction cork is a solid, uniformly thick layer under ideal conditions.

It's been a while since I had a bottle of wine which had a cork not composed partly of compressed fragments of cork, though.
posted by jamjam at 2:11 PM on October 10, 2012

I'd say horizontal, but maybe we're saying the same thing. There's a very clear picture in the linked article.
posted by MrMoonPie at 2:34 PM on October 10, 2012

It's funny that you bring this up because it was just a post on Metafilter.

On preview, exactly what Yellow posted.
posted by InsanePenguin at 3:39 PM on October 10, 2012