“I love the romance of it.”

That’s the rationale I hear most often, when consumers talk about pulling the cork from a bottle of wine.

It’s part history, part ritual, part resistance to synthetic closures, and part justification. All told, it amounts to the strongest and most emotional argument for the two-inch natural cork closures of several billion bottles of wine globally.

That’s a lot of cork.

lots of good interesting info from Cathy Huyghe at Forbes.com