From Beirut to Jupiter: Down on the Farm

I had made reservations for a cork farm two hour hiking tour the night before, but I got a phone call in the morning saying that it was a mistake, that I shouldn't have been able to reserve the tour because they weren't having one. But they did have a jeep tour available, which turned out to be better for Chris. All the walking we were doing was wearing him out.

Technology

Can I just take a minute to marvel at the fact that we can use our phones normally from nearly anywhere in the world? I know I say this every trip I go on, but it is really incredible. I went from not being able to figure out how to use a payphone in Ireland during my very first trip to Europe and having limited email access in Luxembourg due to the ratio of computers to students to using an entirely different sim card in Lebanon to having very expensive and limited data plans abroad to $10 a day (max $100), ironically on another trip to Ireland 20 years from the first. We live in amazing, amazing times. Appreciate them!

I honestly don't know what I'd do without a phone now. We make our plane, hotel, car, and train reservations on it. We use Google Maps and GPS to get around instead of the old paper maps that you could never again fold quite right. We buy tickets to museums and tourist sites as we stand in front of the museums and tourist sites, avoiding lines. We communicate with others who don't speak our language using Google Translate. We convert currencies, temperatures, and measurements. We even catch a game of our favorite sports teams if we're at a table somewhere or download new music we've learned about while traveling. And we uber, never again getting stranded for missing the last train because we were just having too much fun.

Of all these changes, one of my favorites is the ability to instantly share our adventures with friends and family on the other side of the ocean, posting photos we took with and edited on our phones. Those of us who love to capture everything remember a time when you had to be discerning in what photos you took, given the limited number of pics you could take with an expensive role of film. 12, 24, or 36. That was it. (I take at least 1000 photos a trip these days, most on my Nikon. But I still took a couple hundred on my phone, too.) You had to get it right in one go, but you didn't know if you got it right until you had them developed, also expensive, and let's be honest, on a role of 24, you probably got ten good ones, and maybe two worth framing. If you were a decent shot.

My god, how many roles of film did I take during that year in Luxembourg or the next year's Transatlantic Seminar in Europe or the following year's internship in Ireland or the two years in California or the six months in Texas or my trips to Egypt and Jordan or all the baseball games or all my time in DC before I got a digital camera? I have volumes of photo albums as part of my personal library and I cherish them all.

But I never want to go back to that. Sure, it takes me months to make photo albums now, because I have to sort through thousands of photos, edit them, print them, and paste them in cute little scrapbooks, but I enjoy doing it, and it brings me back to the trips themselves.

The Farm

But this post is supposed to be about cork. It was my second favorite thing we did on the trip.

We had to drive about a half hour to the Corktrekking (if you go to Portugal, I highly, HIGHLY recommend them.) The tours are a small part of the farm's operations, but in my opinion, a pretty vital part of it, given the existential threat cork trees face. People NEED to know what is happening to this planet. We can see it with our own eyes, but if you never leave your house, you're probably missing it!

A pair of Dutch brothers own the farm, although technically it's two farms because of inheritance taxes and blah blah. Smart on their part. From the warehouse meetup point, we hopped into a 4x4 jeep-type vehicle with another couple, Kate and Kyle (I remember this because I made a joke about all of our names starting with K sounds, LOL) and went to Peter's farm, which includes a winery that produces high quality - and expensive - wines. In a country where wine is oh so cheap, I was surprised to learn their wines go for $300 a bottle and are served at the highest end restaurants. Needless to say, we had none.

Our "trekking" vehicle

To get to the farm, you have to take a dirt road that divides the farms of two other brothers, both terrible people, apparently. They hate each other, and one has cows that he lets eat the grape vines of the other. You could see almost total destruction of his vineyard. I wonder if the cows get drunk. LOL. Our guide, Julia, hinted at some choice words for them, though she refrained from saying them aloud.

We got through their property and hit the farm, where we found beautiful wine fields fading into autumn colors. The grapes had been harvested in August to save them from the drought that saw zero inches of rain the entire summer. In this region - the hottest part of Portugal - grapes are usually harvested in September. They would have lost the entire crop had they waited until then. Julia told us this year's wine would be "strong" but good. (It's a shame I won't get to try it; I tend to like that type of wine.)

She found some grapes on the vine - syrah - and let the four of us taste them. Tiny but tasty. They grow four types of grapes, including one of my favorites - tempranillo.

Holms

But...cork!

Wait, first, holms and pigs! Holms, or live oaks, are cousins to cork trees, which are also oaks. Neither of their leaves look like our trees in America, and they are dwarves compared to our towering and majestic oaks. This is, of course, because they exist in hot environments in Mediterranean and Med-adjacent countries, where all trees are shorter. They are oak trees because they produce acorns.

The holms produce acorns that pigs LOVE, so in the spring, pigs arrive to roam freely among the holm trees to get fat before they are shipped to Spain and turned into prosciutto (presunto in Portuguese) before getting shipped back. You can't go to the Iberian peninsula without eating tons of prosciutto, and it's damn good. Of course the pigs for this year were already prosciutto by the time we got to the farm. Poor piggies, but so delicious!

Old Rocks

We returned to the car and drove a bit before stopping at a pile of rocks. Turns out, it was a prehistoric burial site - called a dolmen - that they recently discovered. A team of archaeologists was working to restore the site, but they had to stop their work when covid hit and they are making plans to return again within the next year or so.

This type of site is all over Portugal and the world. Korea has 40% of the world's known dolmens. They're found all over India, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, especially where Celtic peoples roamed, as they did in Portugal. Dolmens are single chamber tombs consisting of two or more upright megaliths (big rocks) supporting another big rock called a "table." The Portuguese ruins are 2000 years older than Stonehenge. (We'd later go to a site they refer to as "Portuguese Stonehenge.)

Finding historic ruins on a farm is not uncommon. But that's true of Europe, the Middle East, and so many other parts of the world. I once went to a farm in Lebanon that was putting in a solar/wind hybrid system, and they found a Roman winery when trying to install the turbine. Very cool.

Who knows what other ancient human creations lie beneath this land?

Cork!

But...CORK!

Then we drove to the cork part of the farm. Unlike many cork farms, this was a natural cork forest that regenerates from wherever the acorns fall. Many cork farms are planted in rows, but this farm is dedicated to sustainable agriculture. Farmers on other farms are exacerbating the effects of climate change with practices that are detrimental to the environment. But many sustainable farms like this exist, and farmers are starting to realize they need to change. The alternative is economic ruin first, then a dystopian nightmare that few people seem to want to prevent. You think the price of eggs is bad now? Wait until there are no eggs. Forget wine - it's already hard enough to grow it now.

Portugal produces 80% of the world's cork and 52% of the world's wine corks, but just a short time ago, they produced 90% of the world's cork and 80% of wine corks. Now, thanks to climate change, the layers of cork bark the trees are producing is often too thin to harvest for wine corks. Not only did they have no rain all summer, but temperatures reached 120° in the region. It was 85° on the day we went. On October 15. NOT NORMAL.

I will never look at a wine cork the same way again. It takes FORTY YEARS to make a wine cork. 40. Four-oh. The cork is harvested by hand every 9-12 years, but it can't be harvested until a tree is 25 years old. The first couple of harvests produce inferior bark. This can be turned into all the souvenir crap they sell - cork bags, cork hats, cork postcards, cork wallets, cork bikinis...at least, our guide Julia claims she saw those. LOL

A cork tree harvested in 2020 (the 0 represents the year of the last harvest)

It isn't until the third harvest that the bark is supposed to be thick enough to make into wine corks. Now, however, even the third harvest often produces a layer that is too thin. It's supposed to be 9-12 years, but it's pushing 12 now, and she said that soon it might be 14 or 15 years between harvests.

There is another threat facing the cork industry as well, one that is well known to farmers in any industry across the world. Younger generations don't want to work on farms, and it's causing a labor shortage. In Portugal, it used to be that cork harvesters - called "strippers" (yes, jokes were made) - passed on their trade from generation to generation. The children would come to the cork harvests to watch and help do menial tasks and grow up around the art. Yes, it's an art. It's a very delicate job. If you cut too deep, you expose the trees to disease. If you don't cut deep enough, you ruin the whole layer. She showed us a tree that was dying because it had been cut too deep. You could see where the bugs had gotten in.

Anyway, the kids don't want to be strippers anymore, and even though they have schools to train strippers, they are starting the learning process in their twenties, too late in life to really get it. I suppose it's like learning a language. It's so much harder when you are older. Enroll your kids in a language course while they're young!

All of this has led to a massive cork shortage. This is why you see screw tops and synthetic stoppers on wine these days. This is fine for grocery store wine. It's not good for better wines. Even though it's "air tight," there is something about it that good wines need, some kind of...breathability? I'm not a scientist or a wine expert, but I trust those who are. The wine cork is an art that has been perfected over millennia.

A third threat is wild boars, which like to sharpen their tusks against the trees, ruining the layer of cork. Because of this, the farm allows hunters.

One last thing about corks. One cork costs $4-$5 to produce, so when you're buying a $15 bottle of grocery store wine, one-third of that cost is the cork. Think about that.

I'm never throwing another cork away again.

(Full disclosure: I've been saving them for years anyway. LOL)

Cork acorns

Because of the scarcity of water, trees grow far apart in a cork forest

A tree that was cut too shallow one year and they had to wait another year to harvest

The tree they called Big Mama. It grows near an underground water source. You can see a well to the right.

Big Mama's branches

wine corks punched from a layer of cork bark

A tree that was cut too deep. Disease has set in and it is dying - you can see the empty branches.

Growing wine and its cork next to each other

Technology Part 2

Back to technology - Google Maps is essential for driving through a place you've never been, but it is still relatively new, all things considered, and is less accurate in some places. I did everything the gringo lady said and still managed to go in circles before getting back on track to head back to Évora. We did get there, however, and found all the free parking on our last night in the city.

I let Chris take a nap and wandered around the city for a bit until it was time to go to dinner. Afterwards, we went to watch some live music at our local pub for our last night in the city.