What do you want from a cork?

You can use a cork as an indicator of the quality of the wine inside the bottle, so if you use an attractive looking (and expensive!) natural cork, it will give an air of quality to the product. Conversely, if you use a screw-top bottle, it will tend to indicate that the wine is cheap and cheerful.

Also consider how important the aging process is to your wine: is the wine you produce ready to drink or will it benefit from a few more years in the bottle? Different corks will allow the wine to age in different ways, so if the bottles are to be aged then it is surely worth considering spending a little more on the corks.

The mechanical reliability of the cork is something to consider: a cheap agglomerated cork is more likely to break in half if opened inexpertly, but a higher value cork or even a screw cap will be more reliable.

What are the cork options?

Going from the cheapest option to the most expensive, these are your top wine cork options:

Synthetic (or screw-on) corks: They offer an inexpensive and reliable way to seal a bottle, but because they don’t allow oxygen into the bottle, they don’t promote aging. Some argue that they cheapen the appearance of the bottle, and by implication the wine inside!

Agglomerated stoppers: they are made from small cork fragments that are glued together to form a uniform stopper. They don’t look particularly natural and don’t have the open-pored structure of natural cork that promotes limited oxygen contact with the wine; however, poorly made agglomerated corks can be prone to breakage.

Micro-agglomerated corks: use finer cork fragments than normal agglomerated corks and are generally more mechanically reliable and more visually appealing.

Technical stoppers: A natural cork disc is used that comes into contact with the wine and agglomerates the body of the cork. They offer a combination of the lower cost benefits of agglomerated corks, along with some of the benefits of natural cork in terms of allowing the wine to age.

Filled stoppers: they are natural corks that have had imperfections on their surface filled with cork dust that sticks to them. It takes advantage of most of the mechanical characteristics of natural corks, at a lower price, although they can have a slightly synthetic appearance.

Natural Corks – They come in several quality brands and require careful selection to ensure a good seal. Allow a limited amount of oxygen to enter the bottle to promote aging, while offering excellent mechanical characteristics. Also offer the beauty of natural cork, to make them by far the most visually attractive option.

There is a big difference in price between a premium natural cork and agglomerated or synthetic stoppers, but they are not intended to do the same job, so they are not really directly comparable. Although the snobbish value of using a higher value cork may be a consideration when choosing the right type of cork, the most important thing to consider is what you intend to happen to the wine once it has been bottled, because the type of cork that the usage will be a key determinant of this.

For further help in deciding which cork is best for your wine, you should consider speaking with a specialist wine cork supplier, such as http://www.corklink.com, who will be able to offer further advice.