Wine Corks...

I recently had a conversation with a colleague who didn't know where wine corks came from.  When I asked him to guess, he thought they were manufactured from some sort of plastic.  When I told him that they were actually made from the bark of oak trees, he was very skeptical.  So we did a little googling and found this great explanation, with lots of photos.

Something else that was a surprise to my colleague: the word “cork” derives from the Latin word quercus, for “oak tree”.  The genus name for oaks is also quercus, and the species that is most often harvested for cork is Quercus suber (though many other oak species can be used to produce cork as well).  Quercus suber is native to the western Mediterranean area, but there are some fine examples in the arboreta of San Diego County, as well as in parks and in landscaping.  It's commonly available in our nurseries...