As someone who has spent his entire career in wine, popping hundred of corks a week, I figured out a long ago that wine corks readily serve more than one purpose. Why throw away a good wine cork? Here are a few suggestions for recycling wine corks. With a little imagination I am sure you can come up with more.
- Cork floats. Attach a wine cork to a key chain. Keys don’t float as many bathers and boaters have come to find out the hard way, unless they are attached to a cork.
- Make a cork wreath and decorate the wreath with the appropriate holiday regalia: bows flowers, fruit, holly etc.
- Make cork figures and ornaments using small finishing nails to keep the corks together. Angels, rocking horses, and just about any figure you want can easily be made from corks. Glue the desired regalia onto the figure and another holiday gift is ready present.
- Wine corks make great buffers between walls and the metal parts of furniture, especially screws and sharp protrusions. Just screw or push the cork onto the protrusion and stop worrying about scuffs and gouges to your walls.
- Create a dart board with your old corks but cutting the corks in half and using the smooth flat insides as the board’s surface.
- And after you have exhausted all other recycling efforts, what’s wrong with putting some of the wine corks from your favorite wines on display in a clear glass bowl or vase? The corks will serve as a reminder of the most memorable wines and can be reused to stop an open bottle or container. And if nothing else, the wine cork vase will in time become a conversation piece to regale visiting wine geeks. Better still, you can have some fun with the snooping wine snob by planting a few choice corks.
Salud!
Don
