What do you do when you have a cork stuck in a bottle? I have had the privilege recently to be drinking a number of bottles of wine that have been more than 25 years old. The only problem is that 25-year or older corks tend to be very soggy and are extremely difficult to remove from the bottle. The only way to be in with a chance with such an old cork is to use the Ah So corkscrew which has two prongs on the outside of the cork to provide enough friction to squeeze the cork, pulling it from the bottle’s neck. Using a center-drilling corkscrew would almost certainly destroy the cork splitting it into little bits. This is a concern in that the cork pieces are small and difficult to clean up and more importantly, you have likely introduced small cork pieces into the wine itself. While you can filter the cork bits out, it is not recommended, as the wine likely has a weak structure and could be damaged by filtering.
I had two bottles recently where the cork slid into the bottle intact, no matter how I tried to remove it. While the cork floats, if the bottle is full, the cork does not have enough air space to get out of the way when the bottle is turned over to pour. The cork wedges into the bottle neck making it impossible, or at least extremely slow and difficult to pour the wine. However, there is an easy way to deal with this – just use a chopstick! The chopstick, stuck into the bottle, easily clears enough room, getting the cork out of the way. You can then easily pour the wine into a glass or decanter and the problem is solved.
If this happens though, you should immediately empty the bottle into a decanter and then refill in another bottle (without the cork) to ensure any possibility of cork taint (not already introduced through the wine touching the bottom of the cork while cellaring) is not worsened.
A cork stuck in the bottle has happened to me about seven times now, but fortunately I have always had a chopstick on hand to help me out!
For me, drinking a great bottle of wine is like being at the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art and seeing an original painting. It is an exquisite experience and even though I may never be able to experience it again, I want to retain and relive the memory.
That would seem quite easy to do in these times of social media with Instagram and Facebook. We can take pictures of our drinking and eating experiences and immediately post them into a variety of public clouds to share with others and to retrieve whenever we want to. But while those pictures provide great memories of the experiences we have had and the great friends and relationships we have, they do not focus on ‘the wine!’
I currently do four things currently to create and relive wine memories, and am about to add a fifth which I learned about from my good friend Dave who also has a place in the Hunter Valley. The four I already do are:
Write this blog – while it is intended for an audience (you) other than me, it also serves as a bit of a wine drinking diary and helps to reinforce my memories by writing them down
I have started some boards on Pinterest relating to Wine Humor, Wine Labels, and Wine Paraphernalia, some which are related to personal wine drinking experience I have had, but many just of interest to share with others
Every time I look at an empty bottle, or a cork, I remember the experience and relive a bit of the wine drinking that went on that evening. It also invokes memories of the friends and experiences we shared while drinking that wine.
The new thing I am going to do, is to create a wine map of the Hunter Valley and pin the wineries we have visited and plan to visit. Dave has made one up, hanging in his hallway and we will be doing similar. It’s a great idea. Dave used a laminated map of the Hunter Valley, added some information regarding wineries and numbers to locate them, and pins with the coding for if they had visited them already or they were on the list to visit soon. The back is cork board and he made the frame out of other wine corks cut in half. This will provide more opportunity for me to use the good corks I have as my two Corkhaus boards will only hold about 110 corks and I certainly have more than that!
These activities are similar to keeping a photo album, but take a little more real estate, especially for the wine bottles. However, it is not much of a difficulty and helps to reinforce and relive the great memories we have had. I am glad I do these things and recommend that some of them may enhance your wine drinking experiences and lifestyle. I love having the constant reminders to prompt pleasant memories!
As mentioned previously, my friend gave me a tremendous cigar for my 60th birthday. You could tell by smelling it, that it would be the finest cigar I have ever smoked. Having smoked it today only confirmed the point! I enjoy a great cigar every now and then, usually smoking the Cohiba Siglo #1 or #2 or the Cohiba Robusto. I may have a Montecristo every now and then. Since I may only have three or four cigars a year, it does not make sense to smoke anything less than the best!
Being on vacation, I brought some cigars along to enjoy while sitting on the back deck in the Hunter Valley. I was also looking for a cause for celebration (beyond just being on vacation!) and had it by having our best quarter ever for my group. We are already over 200% of sales plan for the quarter and finished the year on a high note. I also got a call Friday at 5:00 pm that we closed our biggest deal ever so far, so I knew I had plenty of justification (or just plenty of excuse!) for smoking “Castro’s Cigar.” (I will explain more later on how this great cigar made for Fidel Castro found its way to me!)
I also like the idea of smoking a victory or celebration cigar to ‘relish the moment.’ Red Auerbach, as General Manager of the Boston Celtics, would sit in Boston Garden watching his beloved Celtics and when he knew the game was in hand, he would light up a cigar, further intimidating the other team. This was a bit arrogant and I am not sure if he ever lit up, only to have the other team come back and win. (Does anyone know?)
I was even more influenced though by Will Smith in the movie “Independence Day.” After a victory in battle (and isn’t life an everyday battle?), Will would always savor the moment by smoking a cigar. I have followed suit and also like to relish the big victories with a good cigar, and had every reason to do so today.
I know this blog is about wine and we will get to the wine soon! However, my choice of wine cannot be adequately justified without explaining how a cigar intended for Castro made its way to me. These cigars are made by Cohiba. They consists of the very best tobacco leaves (similar to premium wines using only the very best grapes). Cohiba then provides these top end cigars to Castro for his private stock.
(I am not certain if everything I mention here is exactly correct, but it makes for a good story, so I will continue!) Every now and then, some cigars are gifted to special friends or used for diplomatic purposes and found their way into the hands of some of the sheiks from Qatar. (I actually do not know if it is now possible to buy these cigars on the open or secondary market at all, but plan to find out!) My friends son is a physiotherapist living in London and provides regular massage to one or several of these sheiks, who as a tip provided some of the cigars to my friend’s son, who then passed on two to his father. His father smoked one and gave the other to me for my birthday. Therefore, I have been waiting for the perfect setting and occasion to smoke this very special cigar and today was the day.
Many of my friends drink cognac or brandy with a good cigar, but I am not into harder liquors. Therefore, I enjoy a good cigar with red wine or port and decided a good bottle of red wine was the answer today. I originally was going to play it safe and go with a bottle of the 2007 McWillams Mount Pleasant Maurice O’Shea Shiraz. This is an outstanding wine and was awarded the ‘best red wine’ several years ago by Campbell Mattinson. I love this wine and knew it would be a great wine to drink while smoking the cigar.
However, I thought that smoking Castro’s cigar was a rare and unique experience and deserved a rare and unique wine. Since we were up in the Hunter, I did not have full access to every wine in my cellar, but found a 1992 Lindeman’s Pyrus. I have had the 1987 Pyrus which was a magnificent wine and decided it was time to open a bottle of the 1992. I was excited as I cut off the seal that the cork appeared in perfect condition – something you cannot guarantee for a twenty year old cork. Still being careful, I used the Ah So cork remover as the best option to get the cork out in one piece and fortunately that is what happened.
I started to decant the wine and was glad to see it still had full crimson color that had not yet turned brownish (a sign that the wine had oxidized to some degree and would be less than optimal if not downright bad). It took a while to work the wine through the filter, even though there was very little obvious tannin separate in the wine. It was just so thick and luscious. While I am sometimes hesitant to use an aerator on a 20 year old wine (since I do not want to break down further an already fragile wine structure), this wine still had a solid structure and I knew that decanting an older Pyrus would take some time and I wanted to help it along with aeration!
We left the wine to decant while out shopping and by the time I got home, it was ready (or maybe since I was just so anxious to get started, I made myself believe it was ready!). Of course, I used the Riedel Vinum Bordeaux glass to drink the wine.
It had roasted nut, plum and full berry flavors. The wine was perfectly balanced with well integrated tannins. It matched a perfect Bordeaux blend using each grape in a well balanced proportion. The grapes were Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec and Cabernet Franc. This was an easy wine to drink, so smooth in texture and at 12.5% alcohol. I loved this wine and it beautifully matched the cigar in terms of rarity and elegance. This wine also won three Gold Medals early in its career.
Wine, cigar and Sandalwood incense burning in the background!
I spent 50 of the most blissful minutes I have ever experienced smoking this cigar and sipping this wine! I was expecting the cigar to go for about 2 hours, as I usually take about 1 hour, 20 minutes to smoke a Cohiba Robusto and this was bigger than the Robusto. I think there were several reasons for the time being shorter than I expected. The first was that the tightness of the rolled tobacco leaves was not as tight as a typical Cohiba and therefore drew more freely and was quicker to burn. Secondly, I was concerned with wasting any possible cigar flavor, so I was puffing harder and more frequently than I would with a so-called ‘normal’ cigar! I just did not want to waste a puff!
I usually cannot smoke a cigar beyond the last 25 cm – 35 cm, as they become too harsh and also are hot on the fingers while holding them. This one however, did not become harsh at all and I could have smoked it to the very end except it was too hot to hold. However, I did get it down to about 18 cm before snuffing it out!
The total experience took 50 minutes and I also got through about 2/3rds the bottle of the 1992 Lindeman’s Pyrus during that time.
While I have had some truly decadent experiences previously in life, I believe this 50 minutes now has reached #1 in terms of decadence and pure sensual pleasure in such a concentrated period of time. I know I will never have a better cigar. I will have comparable wines (heck, I still have two more bottles of the 1992 Lindeman’s Pyrus left!) but the combination of the wine, the cigar and the reason for celebration was a truly unique and pleasurable experience.
“Just open it and drink it,” many of you would say. But a 20 year old iconic red wine certainly deserves more care and ceremony than that! A number of seemingly small steps can make the difference between the wine being ‘passable’ and exceptional. And it only takes a few more minutes to make it exceptional, so you would be foolhardy if you did not give it a chance!
Granted, the wine will be good or ‘not good’ mostly based on how it has been stored for the last 20 years and what has happened with the micro-oxidation that has gone on in the bottle during that time. This will be heavily influenced by the cork quality and if it has been faithful or not.
While you are no longer in control of the previous storage or the cork quality, there are four things you have control over in preparing the wine for drinking, all which may influence if the wine is suitable or not:
Removing wine from cellar / storage, stand up-right and let rise to room temperature
Choosing to use an Ah So cork remover as the cork will be fragile (any cork after 12 – 15 years tends to become saturated and soggy (unless the cork grain is very tight) and is at risk of breaking apart. See picture in my post ‘A disappointment, but one moves on!’) of a crumbled cork from a 17 year old bottle of wine.)
Decanting the wine, avoiding the use of a filter or aerator if possible. If required, use a filter, but never an aerator for a 20 year old wine
Let decant for only 30 – 60 minutes. Then re-bottle if not already consumed, and consuming the wine within several hours
You should remove the wine 3 – 12 hours before you plan on opening it. By allowing it to come to room temperature slowly before opening the bottle will put less stress on the wine as you decant it. And standing it up allows any free sediment to settle to the bottom of the bottle, potentially removing the need to filter the wine while decanting.
Perfectly preserved cord after 20 years!
The Ah So cork remover is far better for delicate corks than more traditional cork screws as it provides a grip on the outside of the cork (instead of drilling down through a soft cork center) and also ensures the cork has been ‘twisted’ to separate the cork from the bottle. Over time, the sugar in wine can crystallize, attaching the cork to the bottle and make it difficult to separate and remove.
Now if you have no sediment and no cork floating in the wine, you can decant slowly without using a filter or aerator. If you do have some indication of sediment or cork, then use a filter but not an aerator. The structure of an older wine becomes very fragile and will start to separate in a short period of time, further losing fruit flavor and its integrated texture, and an aerator worsen this effect noticeably. (While I am a big fan of aerating most wines, never aerate a ‘museum’ wine.
Let the wine decant for a short period of time, maybe 30 – 60 minutes. This old a wine does not usually require much more air to make it ready to drink. You usually just want to get any older smells entrapped in the bottle out and let the wine breath a little. If you are not going to drink the wine immediately, then re-bottle it, but make sure to consume within several hours. This old a bottle of wine will not last the day without some deterioration.
There are a few exceptions to this rule for very robust, built to last wines, but this is the general rule. You can test a sip or two every 15 minutes to see if the wine continues to improve or not and once it shows no further sign of improvement, then re-bottle. Some wines such as an older Penfold Grange and the 1987 Lindeman Pyrus require a long time to decant to reach maximum potential.
I used the above process to open a bottle of the 1992 Lindemans Pyrus. This is a beautifully-aged wine made of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec and Cabernet Franc. This type of blend has great potential to last a long time and beautifully mature in terms of the complexity and integration of flavors. Thanks to the cork being in perfect condition, the wine is exquisite! It would have been slightly better 3 – 5 years ago and has lost just a touch of its fruit flavors, but still very flavorful. It has big plum flavors with a trace of tobacco which I really enjoy in an aged red wine.
The structure of the wine has held up well, but is fragile and will not last long. Therefore, I need to drink this wine today. I am craving a pizza to go with it, or some nice lamb, but we planned to have leftover black bean soup, some corn-on-the-cob, and a salad for dinner. But it seems almost sinful to have this great wine with a spicy black bean soup!
Cheese/meat plate with 1992 Lindemans Pyrus and Rockmellon
Therefore, we decided to make a last moment change (as the soup, salad and corn-on-the-cob will last until tomorrow) and made up a cheese and salami / prosciutto plate instead which will suffice for dinner and be more enjoyable with the wine than black bean soup!
I am now 2/3rds the way through the bottle (and finished with this post!), so you do not need to be concerned if I finish the wine today or not!
[Post-writing update: I stand corrected. I saved the other 1/3 rd of the bottle for a day later, and it was still surprisingly good. If a wine is very well crafted such as the 1992 Lindemans Pyrus was, then there is less of a concern about it deteriorating quickly. This wine is still a star the day after opening!]
Last night, my lovely bride and I drove to the Hunter Valley and arrived in time for dinner at the Blue Thai restaurant which we really enjoy. The food is great and the crowd is certainly interesting and entertaining as the restaurant abuts a trailer and camping park. It is a BYO restaurant, which is a concept I always like! There were several cartons of box wine sitting on other tables (why come to the Hunter Valley and get box wine?!?!) and I expect there were not many other bottles over $10 in the restaurant that night.
Yet, Thai food has such tremendous flavors and deserves to be paired with good wine. We usually bring a Gewurztraminer, Semillon or Riesling. Tonight we brought along a bottle of the 1995 Penfolds Adelaide Hills Semillon Trial Bin. I have four bottles of this, but had not had much interest in trying one as it was an inexpensive wine I purchased back in 1997 in Melbourne. It had not been cared for well either in that it made a trip across the ocean to the US in 1998 when I moved back there, and then a trip back home in 2000 when I moved here permanently. Fortunately, most of the wines that made the journey over and back did not suffer much (the better ones were stored in Styrofoam cases) , but some of the cheaper ones were affected.
Recently, I have come to realize that the 1995 Adelaide Hills Trial Bin was one of the wines that was an experiment as a possibility for Penfolds White Grange (according the the public, not Penfolds) which ultimately resulted in the Yatarnna Bin 144 Chardonnay. Plus some of the wine auction houses I was talking with expressed interest in selling this wine at auction and that peaked my curiosity. I decided it was worth trying a bottle to see if it was still good. After all, it was selling for between $25 – $30 per bottle on the secondary market.
Crumbled cork
Halliday reviewed this wine a long time ago and said it was drinkable until about 2003 and here I am thinking about trying it almost a decade after that. Yet, I have had many aged Semillons that have really stood the test of time. However the bottle I opened last night, had not! It was unfortunately corked. I used the standard cork screw from the restaurant, but the cork just crumbled. I then drove home to get my Ah So cork screw. The Ah So cork screw is about the only way to get old cork out of an old bottle. It is designed to be able to get old and soggy corks out of the bottle, and I may have had some luck had I started with this, but the cork was so soggy and cushy that I could not get a good grip on it. It was the first time ever that I was not able to remove a cork with the Ah So, and had to push it into the bottle.
I was still hopeful because the wine had a beautiful golden color to it, and their was no obvious fault when visualizing the wine. However, it had lost much of its flavor and had a metallic taste to it. It tasted like someone had squeezed a melon onto a piece of sheet metal and licked it. (I am imagining this is what it would have tasted like – I have not actually done this!) You could tell this was a fine wine in its time, but had oxidized too much. I still managed a few sips with dinner to try to figure out what it would have been like without the fault, but we left 2/3rds of the bottle and mostly had water with dinner.
I am hopeful that the remaining three bottles of this wine may have traveled better than this one did. Cork variability can be quite large. Recently about two weeks apart, I had two bottles of the 2003 Blueberry Hills Pinot Noir and the second one was significantly better than the first one (as described in post). Since both Pinot Noirs had been stored properly and in exactly the same manner, the difference could only be attributable to the difference in cork structure. Therefore, I will try each bottle of the 1995 Penfolds Adelaide hills Semillon Trial Bin and hopefully one or two of the remaining three bottles will be real gems!
For decades now, the controversy has been raging about the screw top and if it is as effective as cork for sealing a bottle of wine. In my opinion, it is 99% as effective in 98% of the cases (the numbers are intuitive and have no statistical value). And the risk of a corked bottle or bottles turning to vinegar because they were left upright for a prolonged period of time (and the corked dried out letting too much air into the bottle) is greatly reduced – therefore you will have far fewer bottles of wine that are damaged. This avoids that disappointment of opening an anticipated and potentially expensive bottle of wine, only to find it is not drinkable. Therefore, I am a big fan of the newer screw top method for sealing wine!
Almost all of the flavor and complexity of the wine (and its ability to mature and reach its maximum potential) is already inside the bottled when it is sealed, regardless of the type of seal used. The quality of grapes and the wine-making process will mostly determine the ultimate quality the wine reaches when you drink it. Regardless of sealing technique, there is air bottled inside to promote the microbiological development of the wine over time.
And here is where the minor difference between using a good cork and a screw top comes into play. Once sealed with a screw top, no more air can get into the bottle. With cork, there is some additional breathing that goes on (very little as the cork is always moist if stored properly and if not stored properly and the cork goes dry, then too much air gets into the bottle and the wine turns to vinegar). This means that a bottle sealed with cork will mature and be drinkable slightly earlier than the same bottle with a screw top. However, there are other factors that may influence the rate of maturation even more, including the temperature the wine is stored at. The warmer the temperature, the quicker the maturation process. However, most good wines can be drunk over a period of years and you need to occasionally taste a bottle to determine how they develop and when to optimally drink them. By doing so, a very slight rate of maturation difference (which is what you have between a cork and a screw top) makes very little difference, either in determining the quality or the right time to drink the wine.
The big difference in my opinion is that screw tops are extremely consistent from cap to cap and each bottle of the same wine from the same vintage will taste the same – there will be very little difference from one bottle to the next. For the most part, this is a very positive trait and provides for a consistent and pleasant drinking experience with no disappointment! Whereas, cork by its very nature has faults or at least differences in the structure and composition from cork to cork. While estimates vary study to study, significant cork faults can occur in between 3% and 15% of corks made. And sometimes, whole batches of bad corks are produced and sold to wine makers which can ruin an entire vintage of the wines.
I once had two bottles one right after the other in a restaurant of the 2003 Leeuwin Estate Art Series Chardonnay (a great wine BTW!) which I was paying $160 per bottle in the restaurant in 2007. While both bottles were acceptable to drink, most of us at the table could determine the slight difference and the second bottle not being quite the same as the first. Just being slightly different meant we found the second bottle to be less enjoyable than the first (because are taste buds had been set and were expecting the exact same taste). I am assuming both bottles came from the same lot and were stored in exactly the manner, so the only difference between the two bottles was due to slight differences in the cork.
For some more complex and long aging wines, it may be possible the a specific cork variation may allow several bottles of that wine to achieve a presence that is unique and slightly better than the majority of the bottles. This is one small advantage of cork as I see it – that because of the variation of the cork from bottle to bottle that some bottles may be better than average, however it also means that just as many may be slightly worse than average! And if the cork is bad, the bottle may be undrinkable! Therefore, the slight advantage that you may find a few bottles of a particular wine that are slightly better than the rest does not, in my opinion, justify the ongoing use of cork. I believe screw tops provide significant advantages overall, including:
consistency from bottle to bottle and ‘no surprises’
no wastage due to ‘corked’ (were the cork is faulty) bottles that have turned to vinegar
no wastage from bottles that have been stored incorrectly (standing up) and the cork has dried out (even though it was a good cork) and the wine has turned to vinegar
ease of use and convenience opening bottles
Most Australian and US wine makers have or are switching over all of their bottling to using screw tops and I believe this is the right thing to do. The wine will not suffer and more of it will be drinkable over the years.
I have a variety of corkscrews and love taking the cork our of a bottle of wine, especially a saturated cork that has been in the bottle for 20 or more years. Getting the cork out successfully is like the thrill of landing a 15 – 20 pound fish on a 6 pound test line! Removing the cork from a bottle is like foreplay before sex – an enjoyable part of the anticipation and build up to drinking the wine. Therefore, I have and will always have bottles in my cellar for the next several decades that have corks for sealing. But I do applaud and agree with the wine makers to switch over to screw tops as the right thing to do – for the wine, the wine maker and the consumer.
What do you do when you have a cork stuck in a bottle? I have had the privilege recently to be drinking a number of bottles of wine that have been more than 25 years old. The only problem is that 25-year or older corks tend to be very soggy and are extremely difficult to remove from the bottle. The only way to be in with a chance with such an old cork is to use the Ah So corkscrew which has two prongs on the outside of the cork to provide enough friction to squeeze the cork, pulling it from the bottle’s neck. Using a center-drilling corkscrew would almost certainly destroy the cork splitting it into little bits. This is a concern in that the cork pieces are small and difficult to clean up and more importantly, you have likely introduced small cork pieces into the wine itself. While you can filter the cork bits out, it is not recommended, as the wine likely has a weak structure and could be damaged by filtering.
I had two bottles recently where the cork slid into the bottle intact, no matter how I tried to remove it. While the cork floats, if the bottle is full, the cork does not have enough air space to get out of the way when the bottle is turned over to pour. The cork wedges into the bottle neck making it impossible, or at least extremely slow and difficult to pour the wine. However, there is an easy way to deal with this – just use a chopstick! The chopstick, stuck into the bottle, easily clears enough room, getting the cork out of the way. You can then easily pour the wine into a glass or decanter and the problem is solved.
