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Corked or Not Corked?

I’ve been waiting for this to happen so I can blog about it.  I opened a bottle of Clos de Marquis 2001 (after dutifully fridging it for half an hour) only to find it was corked.

Fortunately I had another bottle so opened that and joy of joys – it was perfect.  So what was the difference?

Both bottles are shown in the picture below-  which do you think was corked?

Clos - which one was corked?

In fact it was the left one.  Let’s look a little closer at the two corks starting with the left one.

Clos…e up - this one was corked

In the picture above we are looking at the top of the cork.  You can see that there is wine staining and if you look along the cork you can see where the wine has leaked.  There are a lot of theories about corked wine, if you want to learn more try this article and wikipedia. In this case there is a storage problem caused by a faulty cork (or my poor storage conditions). The cork has leaked and the wine has over-oxidised.

In the picture below we examine the right hand bottle and its cork.

Clos….e up this one was just fine 

Although there is clear staining on the cork, there is no leakage.  The picture below shows the top of the cork where there is no staining at all.  So the wine has spread a little but the cork has held its banks and the wine is fine.

Look no leakage….

Next time you are out and the waiter is opening the wine, keep an eye on the cork.  Its the first (but far from only) sign of the quality of the wine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 8:24 pm and is filed under bordeaux, Serving Wine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Corked or Not Corked?”

  1. Richard Ross Says:
    May 17th, 2007 at 2:03 pm

    well done with the blog.

    As for your ‘Corked or Not Corked?’ entry, presumably the answer is ‘Not’. As you say further down the post, you suspect the faulty cork has caused oxidation – so not a corked wine then?!

    Yours pedantically,

    Richard.

  2. Alastair Bathgate Says:
    May 18th, 2007 at 7:21 am

    Richard

    I hold my hands up – it’s a fair cop!

    It’s not strictly “corked”. However, there are many signs of “damaged” wine that can be spotted by examining the cork and I don’t like it when waiters try to hide the cork from me -make me instantly suspicious!

    Cheers for the comment.

  3. Man City are Rubbish Says:
    June 1st, 2007 at 3:36 pm

    I find the screw cap on my Blue Nunn more reliable than a cork ! Seriously though, I know is probably uncouth in the connoisseur’s mind to even mention this but what is it that you lose through a bottle having a screw cap or one of the new fandangled plastic corks ?

  4. Alastair Bathgate Says:
    June 2nd, 2007 at 11:32 am

    Hi MCaR
    Many decent wines come with a screw cap these days including Cloudy Bay – one of my favourites and at £15 to £20 a bottle not exactly cheap plonk.
    Personally I think more wines should be screw capped or (if you want to retain the ceremony) plastic corked.
    Is that an oxymoron, paradox, solecism or a litotes? How can a cork be plastic?

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