AMORIM GROUP :: Cork Museum

The Founder’s Museum is one of the CORTICEIRA AMORIM’s new premises. The museum is located in the emblematic building called “Palheiro da Eira” that housed the family’s first business, in Santa Maria de Lamas. The Founder’s Museum constitutes a hub for interconnecting and interrelating the history of cork and the Amorim family’s workplace history.

The Founder’s Museum pays homage to the founder of the family’s business, António Alves de Amorim, and his successors as well as to all the men and women that brought the cork industry to life through their know-how and dedication. The Museum is the embodiment of the job of recovering all of the artefacts comprising the family’s estate concerning the cork business: written media, historical documents, photographs, painted panels, tools and work utensils and other objects of significant cultural interest.

Cork: a historical overview.

Pride of place amongst the many different objects on display in the museum is an amphora dated to 200 B.C., which was found in the River Sado estuary. This object has great historical significance for this industry, since it is a proof that the use of cork stoppers, the preferred seal of amphorae, goes all the way back to ancient times.

There are brief historical references of the use of cork stoppers by the Ancient Egyptians in the third millennium B.C. and also by other peoples. In Greece, an amphora dating to the fifth century B.C. with the cork stopper still in place was discovered in an ancient Greek marketplace in Athens. During excavation work in Pompeii, archaeologists also found amphorae with cork stoppers.

In 1952, Captain Cousteau recovered about seven thousand 2200 year old amphorae from the seabed off the Italian coast, some of them still sealed and containing wine.

Cork is also mentioned in odes, poems and important written works from different times, as a material used for a wide variety of purposes.

Wine and the development of the cork industry

Cork achieved a position of certain renown in the 14th century as the transport of wine grew at a vigorous rate. The position achieved by cork was driven by the Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon, the cellar master of Hautvillers Abbey.
D. Pérignon was not content because the wooden plugs with hemp wrapped around them that sealed the bottles often popped out to the bottleneck.
Dom Pérignon noticed that wine from the Champagne region tended to develop a natural froth under pressure inside the glass bottles. Therefore, inspired by the cork-sealed pots of pilgrims from Compostela, he decided to use cork to seal his bottles. The excellent performance provided by the cork led to the birth of a new alliance of cork stoppers and glass bottles, which was further improved in the same century by advances in glassmaking techniques achieved in England.

Since cork stoppers were capable of safeguarding all the qualities of wine, they were soon employed in all products of the most important wine producing firms, such as Ruinart and Moet et Chandon.

The Cork Stopper

The cork stopper naturally plays a lead role in the Founder’s Museum. The manufacturing process is demonstrated through photographs, tools and working utensils, covering the evolution of manufacturing techniques in all stages, from the gathering of the raw material up to the manufacture of the cork stopper, to the present day.

The first cork stoppers

Cork stoppers were initially made from cork blocks (cork parallelepipeds), already cut to the length of the final product. These were called “reproduction” stoppers and were produced by a circular cut in the cork block using a burro (knife).

The Garlopa

At the start of the twentieth century the first industrial cork stopper manufacturing machine was invented. The cork block (parallelepiped) was secured by a clamp. Light pressure was then applied to make an auger rotate the cork block against a sharp blade, thereby producing totally cylindrical stoppers.

Other objects on display

The environment is indicated by reference to a cork pile, along with working utensils such as axes, drinking cups, manual drills and artefacts such as pails, basins and small items originating from the early business years of Amorim & Irmãos, such as business registers, canteen mugs, photographs of the founders an many more items.

A meeting point

The Founder’s Museum also possesses a large room on the upper floor, besides the areas devoted to history. This room is equipped with all the audio-visual equipment necessary for holding conferences, meetings and other events, organised for the purpose of supporting the different cork business units.