In the 1990s, I went to take a look at Amorim in Portugal, the world’s pre-eminent cork supplier. On the way to one of their cork processing plants, my host anxiously discussed the weather reports in Europe’s wine regions. Spring frosts and unsettled weather in June, when the vines flower, can seriously reduce the number of grapes, thereby having a direct effect on the number of corks needed the following year. Wine bottle stoppers account for 70 per cent of the value of cork producers’ sales. The cork industry and the wine business are symbiotically linked – which is why it is so extraordinary that there has traditionally been such a gulf between them.

At a restaurant later that day, my host clearly had remarkably little notion of what to order from the wine list. Unlike wine glass manufacturers and designers, cork producers have rarely been seen on the international wine scene. But most extraordinarily of all, cork producers spent almost two decades up to 2000 in denial about a cork scourge that fatally tainted a substantial proportion of the wine it stoppered.