Amorim kept wine in cork by engineering the cork itself

In 1870 António Alves Amorim opened a hand cork-stopper workshop at the docks of Vila Nova de Gaia, the port town across from Porto; the family incorporated as Amorim & Irmãos in 1922. By the turn of the millennium the company had grown into the world's largest cork processor — but its core market was under existential attack: 'corked' wine, contaminated by the compound TCA, was pushing wineries toward screwcaps and plastic stoppers, and cork looked like a dying craft.

Amorim's answer was to out-engineer the alternatives instead of surrendering to them. In 2000 it launched Twin Top, a micro-agglomerated stopper built from cork granules — a consistent, contamination-free product that used cork's own material — and in 2004 introduced ROSA, a controlled steam-treatment that removes TCA and related taint compounds. A later technology (NDtech) tests each stopper individually, rejecting any above a 0.5 nanogram threshold: quality control at the level of the single cork.

The strategy worked: cork is still the wine industry's closure of choice, natural stopper production exceeds 3 billion units a year, and Amorim remains the world's largest cork group — a 150-year-old family business whose survival came not from nostalgia but from reinventing its raw material as cutting-edge technology.