Corks can be everywhere for a wine lover. The wonderful sound they make when they pop out of a bottle just perfectly and the wine is at its peak. Sometimes they can be the devil incarnate, it seems, when they refuse to come out of the bottle the way they should. Sometimes they crumble, sometimes they break in half and sometimes they just have to be pushed into the bottle and then the wine has to be strained before serving. I have a collection of assorted cork screws and apparatuses to help get a cork out of the bottle, some work great and some I just kind of shake my head at. This entire introduction and I am not going to go into a diatribe as to whether there should or shouldn’t be corks for sealing a bottle.

I have been saving corks, just like I have been saving wine labels for years. For a long time I just saved the labels instead of mounting them in my wine scrap books for reference. They all ended up as “wall paper” inside of my wine cellar and the funny thing is, most of them you cannot see, until you remove a bottle of wine from the rack, but I enjoyed that labor of love. Now I can resume my wine scrap book, but I decided the other day to go and gather up all the corks that have been hiding throughout my house.

I am going to get creative again, and just like the wine labels, the corks are now going to become a decoration in the wine cellar. I am going to use them as a type of crown molding, and I have been thinking about this labor of future love for some time and the time is getting near.

I spent an afternoon opening up cookie tins, coffee can, popcorn tins and even those cute cork canisters that my Bride has bought to be decorative. I sorted and sorted and sorted corks. I now have one big bucket that has just plain corks with no decorations on them. Then there are two big buckets that have corks with designs and wordings on them. I also filled another bucket with sparkling wine corks, and I am still thinking of how they will fit into the grand scheme.

All the while I was also tossing some corks into a special bucket. These were special corks. Like a Chateau Latour or a Colgin. There are several assorted Opus One corks, because they even have the vintage stamped onto the cork. The Domaine de la Romanee-Conti has a special design. All the while I am lamenting about all the corks that crumbled that were special like all the First Growth Medoc wines from 1961. Why you may ask did I make a special grouping of these corks? Several years ago, one of my Bride’s cousins bought me a special Christmas present, it was a trivet or a hot plate where the main part is corks that you supply, fit into the box like a jigsaw puzzle. I will finally get that gift out of one of the bookcases in the library and actually finish that gift. When it is done, it will be either a trivet or it can be hung on the wall and be a corkboard note collector. So yes I was a hoarder for years and now I am getting ready to be an artist again. Down the road there will be pictures; and I know that you are all excited.