Portugal produces
about half of the world's cork wine stoppers.
Most come from these trees here in the Alentejo Region.
But harvesting a tree takes years of expertise,
and steady hands.
We went inside the world's largest cork forest
to see how Portugal produces 40 million cork stoppers a day.
These are cork oak trees.
They're so special,
they've been protected under Portuguese law since 1209.
So harvesters have strict rules to follow.
The trees can't be touched
for the first 15 years of their lives.
And they can only be harvested every nine years,
so the bark has time to grow back in between.
Since the first two harvest of a new tree
don't produce the best cork,
harvesters have to wait 33 years to get the good stuff.
Every summer, harvesters peel off the bark
using century-old techniques.
Only the outer layer can be harvested.
To prevent that, workers leave the inner layer untouched.
We can harvest the bark of the tree
without damaging the bark.
So the cells can grow again
without any impact in the life of the tree.
Because the trees regenerate,
they'll never run out of cork.
The oldest tree on record is an estimated 200 years old.
and has been harvested 20 times in its lifetime.
After the cork planks are stripped from the trees,
they're pressed between concrete slabs for six months,
then they're sent to a processing facility
to be boiled for at least an hour.
That's to sterilize the planks and make them softer.
This machine punches out the stoppers
we see in our wine bottles.
Those corks are shipped out to 100 different countries.
But the rest of the cork left behind
in this process isn't wasted.
We don't waste anything,
even the small residues
All that by-product
can be made into things like flooring
or granulated stoppers,
used to cork less expensive wines.
Cork harvesting goes back millennia.
Egyptians used stoppers in tombs,
and the Romans used cork in shoes.
Today, Portugal harvest 100,000 tons of cork every year,
and owns a third of the cork oak forests in the world.
That is a real retainer of CO2 protected for biodiversity.
This tree that separates the south of Europe
and North Africa from the Sahara Desert,
so it's a barrier to desertification.
Cork's sustainability
was part of what saved the Portuguese wine stopper.
In the early 2000s,
winemakers makers began turning to synthetic closures
and screw tops for bottles, and the value of cork plummeted.
But as consumers became more
environmentally conscious in the 2010s-
The movement against single-use plastics
that is happening all over the world,
it's a real opportunity for cork.
Cork exports grew 52.3% in nearly a decade.
In 2018, Portugal passed a record billion dollars
worth of cork exports.
Exports, we kept that number
and very close to 1.1 billion in 2019.
And now we are waiting for the final numbers of 2020.
But as a global pandemics, as a global crisis,
we are expecting also some impact in our business.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic,
the 2020 harvest didn't stop.
The cork harvest this year happened very smooth.
We are talking about an activity
that is done at open air itself.
The industry's success in the last decade
has allowed Portugal to take its cork products
into other industries.
From construction, to automotive industry,
to aerospace, to sports, fashion, clothes.
But even as cork demand continues to grow,
harvesters plan to keep doing things
the same way they always have,
with a good ax.