I can’t afford to spend a whole lotta money on wine. I tend to buy bottles in the $10-15 range (below that price point I seem to run into wines I don’t find particularly drinkable); I drink them a glassful or so a day to make them last; and I generally only buy a bottle or two at a time.

I hate opening a bottle and finding it skunky.

That’s never happened to me with bottle that’s been closed with a fake cork.

Here’s an piece by Mark Fisher of the Dayton Daily News about fake corks — read the comments, too, a number of knowledgeable people chimed in.

Unfortunately, phasing out cork wine stoppers may have an environmental price: as long as cork wine stoppers have value, it’s a good bet cork oak tree forests will be left intact.

These scattered pockets of cork oaks, mostly in Portugal and Spain, thrive in the hot, arid conditions of the southern Mediterranean, sheltering a wide array of biodiversity and helping to protect the soil from drying out. In addition, some wildlife depends upon cork oak forests for their survival, including the Iberian lynx and the Barbary deer, as well as rare birds such as the Imperial Iberian eagle, the black stork and the Egyptian mongoose.

Figures, doesn’t it?

(Hey, can I drink fake corked wines with a clear conscience if I install cork flooring somewhere? I’d love to install cork flooring somewhere . . . )