Never before - in the seven years of my column - have I written about the cork and its problems. Not because I don't know about the vexing problem, or because I want to keep quiet about it or even negate it. But the dogged, even passionate fight, the emotional campaign against the natural cork has annoyed me for years. I wanted to know something about a wine and first had to listen to long tirades about how harmful the cork can be for a wine. I soon read more about the villain cork in wine forums than about the goodness of the wine. Then, when a wine magazine I hold in high esteem wrote endlessly about the corks and very little about the wine at a Bordeaux tasting "Ten Years After", I went into "inner emigration". It is true that I was annoyed when a cork taint appeared and I had to leave a wine to the sink. But I wrote it off - especially with old wines - under "pp = personal bad luck" (that's the term used in a forum).