Saving Old Wine Corks From Oblivion

About fifteen years ago, one could not find one drinker of wine in my circle of friends. We would all rather revert to beer, once in a while. Somehow unexpected, my best friend took the decision to entirely renovate his basement, transforming it into a wine cellar. This occurred in the city of Arad, Romania, a place close to the border with Hungary. Needless to say, the shelves of the new wine sanctuary could not stay empty. Thus, we slowly and timidly started trying out various types of wine. In the beginning, we were only four adventure seekers: a dentist, two journalists and an IT engineer.

In 2012, the four of us became the founders of a wine club, which we subsequently named “The Unauthorized Wine Tasters Club”, out of a sheer instinctual rebellion against those who wanted to complement their passion of wine with a diploma! We even chose a rather unusual mascot for our club - a sommelier cat. Two rooms in our friends’ home became the tasting quarters, and prior to the pandemic, the club would hold up to sixty wine tasting events per year. We like to say to the outsiders that the club is always closed, because we only allow members to a tasting soirée. Today the club has over 150 club members, in total.

The wine has taught us unexpected things, has helped us make new friends and facilitated trips to twenty eight foreign countries. Annually, we literally ended up leaving behind thousands of corks after these events. Thus, this is how the idea of saving them for posterity has come into being!

In 2015, in a moment of revelation, we came up with the idea of setting up an exhibit in which a few members of our club would create various objects that were left behind after each wine-tasting event.

We had on display objects made out of wine-bottle corks, empty-bottle lamps, paintings created with red wine, jewelry made from stones with hues of various wines, photographs from our wondrous wine-cellar journeys, picnic tables assembled from bottles and glasses, a Christmas tree made out of over 260 bottles. This turned out to be some sort of artistic event akin to a flash mob - perhaps the longest one in the world! - which lasted four hours and involved 360 participants. Seven wine cellars offered everyone wine.

Then came the 2020 pandemic which made our physical proximity impossible, but the wine consumption did not dwindle. Having more time on my hands, I came up with the idea of transforming the wine corks into 3D portraits, all culminating with a large “painting” created exclusively out of corks. The best compliment I received at the time was when a friend offered me his collection of corks, one that he had started two decades prior, asking me to use them in my works. The second compliment came from... a Facebook robot which, after my having posted a portrait created out of corks, prompted me to tag the face of the person in the photograph.

And so goes the story behind the objects I created out of corks, some of which you can see here.

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My first DIY project comes with a story. A chair that has been in my family since the ‘60s broke, but I did not want to throw it away. I saved its thin wooden frame and I started to rebuild the chair, this time using wine-bottle corks. Seven months later, with my working on it no more than twenty minutes a day, the chair was finally saved. I personally was very pleased with the outcome.

To my surprise, a short time after I finished my little project, a European author of a wine book saw the chair, liked it and asked my permission to publish its photo in her book. Furthermore, a professor from France spotted the chair in the wine book and included the photo in the university's course on “Vineyards and Wine.”

Therefore, nowadays, not only does my fortunate wine chair have a new life, but it also comes with a chain of unexpected events and its fifteen minutes of fame.

The series of events would not but encourage me to move forward with what had become my new hobby. Thereafter came a guitar, after having come across an idea shared by someone online.

Please feel free to use/share the photos by giving credit to the photographer (Vali Saminta) and to the creator of the cork objects (Dan Coclici). Contributor to the translation into English of this presentation: Flavia E. Laun.