I URGE everyone to buy only bottles of wine with cork stoppers this Christmas.

Cork is natural and bio-degradable, produced from a sustainable agricultural system based on native vegetation that supports a diversity of wildlife.

A fall in demand for cork as a result of the recent and ongoing switch to plastic stoppers in wine bottles, would lead to cork oak forests being abandoned or converted to other uses, thus reducing or even causing the extinction of the unique wildlife in these forests as well as the loss of thousands of jobs.

I was unaware of all this until I read a leaflet produced by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

We can all help by buying wine with cork stoppers and asking retailers to label their wines accordingly. And if you buy a bottle of wine and find it has a plastic stopper, you are within your rights to take it back to the shop and ask for a refund.

Mrs C Sidwell, Lancaster.