If you might travel through southern Portugal's dry hilly alantasia region between the months of May and August,

you might hear this sound.

That moment, that sound is exactly the same sounds the Romans heard 2,000 years ago. That's Carlos de Jesus. He's the

director of communications at Amoram Cork, the world's largest court producer.

And the sound he's talking about is an axe hitting a

cork tree during the cork harvest. It's a delicate job. The harvester has to cut

into the tree just enough to access the layer beneath the bark.

That layer, the cork itself, is then stripped away.

The tree becomes orange and there's this really sweet

honeysuckle kind of smell around and there's a thump and the birds are saying

I can tell it it's truly magical.

Amoram's cork gets turned into a variety of products, shoes, flooring, insulation, but about one third of it is carved into little cylinders that gets stuffed into the necks of wine bottles.

And every year we sell about six billion of these quarks around the world.

Those six billion quarks translate into more than 800 million dollars in annual revenue.

But these days in the wine business, cork is no longer the only game in town. Back in the 90s,

court would have 96, 97% market share,

and we all know that your propensity to listen when you have 96 or 97% market share,

that propensity does not go up on the contrary.

So we pay the price for that.

For the Freakonomics radio network, this is the economics of everyday things.

I'm Zachary Krakett.

Today, Wine Cork's.

...