We are very excited to help promote this amazing new company! Check out their website: http://winebottlerecycling.com/
Here’s a quote from their home page:
Wine Bottle Renew provides wineries with clean, safe and cost-effective wine bottles.
Our service enables wineries to significantly lower their carbon footprint, lower their wine bottle cost and provide a good-for-everyone solution for wine loving consumers.

We are very excited to help promote this amazing new company! Check out their website: http://winebottlerecycling.com/
Here’s a quote from their home page:
Wine Bottle Renew provides wineries with clean, safe and cost-effective wine bottles.
Our service enables wineries to significantly lower their carbon footprint, lower their wine bottle cost and provide a good-for-everyone solution for wine loving consumers.

Recently First Lady Obama hosted celebrity chefs Bobby Flay, Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse to the White House for a “cook off”. As all of these chefs are collection partners for Cork ReHarvest, we thought it would be a great idea if the White House did the same. So we’re asking our loyal Facebook friends to write a letter to First Lady Obama, to ask her staff to take part our program. There is a Whole Foods Market .8 miles from the White House on P St. where they would gladly take the corks. Let’s see if we can make this happen!

We got a nice mention from the “green wine groupie”: http://www.oregonwinepress.com/article…

New Seasons Market announces a new partnership with Cork ReHarvest, Willamette Valley Vineyards and Bacchus Fine Wines that enables customers to recycle their corks at all of our nine stores.

Starting June 14, customers can now bring their corks to any New Seasons Market and simply drop them in a cloth bag hanging in the beer and wine department of each store.

“I discovered years ago that corks really shouldn’t be placed in your compost bin–they never really break down,” said Toni Ketrenos, New Seasons Market Beer and Wine Buyer. “Helping divert them from the waste stream and into a product that’s regularly used in our industry makes so much sense. Every little bit helps.”

What happens after you drop your corks in the bag?

Cork ReHarvest works with our wine distributor, Bacchus, to collect corks during their regular store stops. The corks are then taken to Western Pulp, which is located near Bacchus’ winery partner, Willamette Valley Vineyards. These corks are then mixed with end-of-use newspaper to create wine shippers for wineries, used by Willamette Valley Vineyards.

This partnership is significant because it creates a closed-loop recycling system, in which the waste or byproduct of one process or product is used to make another product.

“We’re really excited to offer this opportunity for our customers to create a local partnership,” says Heather Schmidt, New Seasons Market Sustainability Manager. “It results in no addition to the carbon footprint of distribution and collection, while also reducing waste and creating a sustainable packaging material.”

Cork ReHarvest is the leading national recycling organization focused on recycling natural cork and educating the public about the vital importance that the Mediterranean cork forests have to the world’s ecological balance. Cork ReHarvest partners with businesses, communities and governments to accelerate the adoption of sustainable practices.

“We are honored to have New Seasons as a collection partner, as they have consistently shown their commitment to sustainable practices, environmental causes and community relationships,” said Patrick Spencer, director of Cork ReHarvest. “We must all work together to ensure the products we purchase come from renewable, recyclable and biodegradable sources.”

May 25th, 2010
Cork ReHarvest is proud to announce its partnership with the Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group. Beginning this month, the group’s 14 Certified Green Restaurants
® in New York City, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, will be collecting their natural wine corks for the Cork ReHarvest recycling program. Batali and Bastianich’s Restaurants
serve anywhere from 1,500 to 5,000 bottles of wine a month each, making their contribution a sizeable one.
“We are very proud to be partnered with such an amazing group of individuals, whose commitment to sustainability, reduce, reuse and recycle are not just buzz words to gain attention, but are at the core of their restaurant groups mission” stated Patrick Spencer, Director of Cork ReHarvest. “The strides this group has made with the Green Restaurant Association and other sustainability and environmental
efforts made this the perfect partnership for us.”

“This was a no-brainer, natural corks are recyclable and we have a lot of them. In addition, Cork ReHarvest collects and transfers the corks in a way that does not increase
their carbon footprint, making this an easy way to do the right thing”, maintains
Chef/Owner Batali.
The cork recycling program is just one way that Cork ReHarvest is bringing attention
to the environmental importance of saving the Mediterranean cork forests, and keeping a reusable resources out of landfills. These 6.6 million acres support one of the world’s highest levels of forest biodiversity and are second only to the Amazon rainforest’s in their importance to our planet’s biosphere. By supporting the Batali & Bastianich restaurants, the public is helping to save one of the world’s most important ecological regions. To learn more you can visit our website at www.corkreharvest.org
For More information on this partnership, please contact Elizabeth Meltz – Director of Food Safety & Sustainability for the B&B Hospitality Group-
ermeltz@bandbhg.com / 646-572-6359

The new question of the week is, “doesn’t recycling the cork here in North America take away cork sales from the farmers you’re trying to protect?” Simple answer: no. Long answer, the cork being collected and recycled by our organization and its partners is not being reused for wine corks as they have been compromised by having a cork screw in them, leaving a hole. The corks that we collect are being used in developing “green” industries here in North America and are not taking away sales from the Mediterranean cork industry. The major goal of our organization is raise awareness about the importance of saving these forests. By helping to inform people about the negative environmental aspects of synthetic closures and screw caps, we hope to reverse the trend of wineries moving to these alternative closures. The cork trees of Portugal are protected and cannot be cut down, but the rest of the Mediterranean cork forests are not. If the move towards alternative closures continues, the unprotected forests will disappear, leaving millions of forest potentially turned to desert. If ever there was evidence that the collection and recycling of the billions of corks, which would otherwise end up in our landfills, was causing financial hardship to the family farmers of the corks forests, we would shut the program down, without question. I hope that helps answer this question for everyone.

It’s the end of the day, April 6th and I’m still in shock and amazement at what has happened today. A dream of mine has come true and I couldn’t be happier. In a national press release, Whole Foods Markets announced its partnership with Cork ReHarvest, to collect natural wine corks in all 292 stores in the US, Canada and the UK. It has been 18 months, hundreds of emails, phone calls and flights to bring this to fruition. It was the hardest and most satisfying work related accomplishment I have ever been involved in. Today’s press release about our partnership is not the goal line it’s just the beginning. It’s the job of everyone at Cork ReHarvest to make sure the program runs smoothly, that all people who have cork to donate have a place to bring it and to always remember that our mission is to help save the cork forests. Everyone who helped bring this train into the station, you know who you are, should take a moment and inhale a deep breath of pride, it was no small feat and I am honored to have shared the ride with all of you. Tonight I sleep the sleep of someone who knows there are still great accomplishments to be had in life and very little time to revel in them.

Today I had the pleasure of attending the Oregon Wine Symposium in the beautiful city of Eugene. During my time there I got to meet and speak with a number of people from all aspects of the wine industry. Mostly I spent my time speaking with the representatives of the cork companies.  The “cork dork” in me can’t stop talking about this amazing tree and how important it is. I attended a seminar on closures, quite interesting. There were three speakers talking about different closure methods. The speaker representing screwcaps made a statement concerning 100% recyclability, as there was a question and answer period; I took an opportunity to ask some questions.  My first question was concerning screwcaps and recycling, noting that they are not currently being recycled here in the US; I asked how can this benefit be made to customers, if in fact it’s not true? My answer was that screwcaps are recycled in Europe and that the representative was “not aware” that the US is not currently recycling them. I found that interesting, as he is selling to an American audience.

My second question concerned a 2007 Transnational, scientific study concerning endocrine disruptor’s found in wines closed with screwcaps. Endocrine disruptor’s are believed to be the major cause of breast and colon cancer in the western hemisphere. Again his answer was, “I’m not aware of that study”.

 The reason I wanted to write about this experience was because of what occurred an hour later. Standing in the trade area, I was approached by a couple who introduced themselves, told me they owned a vineyard/winery and thanked me for my questions at the seminar. Based upon my questions and the subsequent non-answers, they had made the decision not to use screwcaps and close their wines with natural cork. Some days it just doesn’t’t get any better! Chalk one up for the Montados.