Over 70% of the world’s wine corks are made in Portugal and the percentage is quite a lot higher than this for natural corks and other high end corks. If you are looking for a new wine cork supplier, then Portugal is the natural place to look, but choosing a supplier is very difficult.
The cork industry structure has changed a lot over the last 10 years or so – from being an industry dominated by one supplier (Amorim) and then three to four hundred small suppliers, there are now a handful of medium and large suppliers and far fewer small ones. In short, the industry has matured and consolidated.
Furthermore, over the last ten years, a few medium sized cork suppliers borrowed heavily and increased their capacity and production quality dramatically to become big players, but most of these got caught out when the price of cork fell over recent years and because they were in massive debt to the banks, they could not survive.
Now the industry still has Amorim as the largest supplier, but there are a small number of large wine cork suppliers that can actively compete with them as well as a number of niche players. Unfortunately there are still a few companies around that sell corks at lower costs without the kind of quality control that wine producers only find out about a few years down the line when clients get round to drinking their wine….
There is no getting round the fact that to producer quality corks requires significant investments in laboratories, stock control, R&D, advanced production techniques and so on. At CorkLink we are focused on providing the best quality corks available on the market at reasonable prices; by allowing our international clients to source direct from Portugal, we can cut out local distributors and offer cost savings without compromising on quality. If you are a wine producer interested in buying corks from us, you would be very welcome to come and visit some of our production facilities or please ask if you would like to see some samples.
