Rare wine company is having its annual sale of decanters. Some date back to the eighteenth century, some from the nineteenth and there is a smattering from the twentieth.
Anybody else collect them?
Sounds like a great present idea. Is there any info? I don’t see anything on their website
is there actually any kind of difference in the glass quality of these older ones? I get this is one of those conversation piece interesting because its older things but I remember these things in this sale always being crazy expensive
I looked at them as well, some were quite beautiful. Very tempting.
I have admired them for years. I worry a bit about lead content . ![[scratch.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/4/42a16863a8714da3c1604419e3eb9206bb87aa50.gif "scratch"){kind=small}
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I wondered about that as well. Does anybody know?
This is an old study, but it kept me from using lead crystal. I haven’t done a recent literature search.
Cheers,
Warren
Agreed. I particularly like the simpler ones. I also had concerns about lead. And volume, as I could see these being rather on the small side compared to modern decanters.
Researches stored port wine in lead crystal decanters and detected 89 micrograms (per liter) after 2 days and 2,000 – 5,000 micrograms after four months. White wine doubled its lead content within an hour and tripled within four. Brandy stored in lead crystal had around 20,000 micrograms of lead after five years.
Hi,
Interesting to learn of the danger of decanting in leadded glass. Are the levels of lead forever constant? Or will levels drop the more the ladded glass is used? Is there a formula for how much over time?
My though: Can a “cheap” alcohol be decanted and tossed, say once a week, till there is relatively no lead danger? Surely leaching can occur only into a certain “depth” of the total thickness of the glass, and/or for so long … Or will all the lead of the decantor eventually have to be leached until the glass is left with “0” lead?
Thanks,
Fred
Reply ↓
Kyle on October 5, 2013 at 11:13 pm said:
Fred, I believe you are correct in that the acid (spirits) will only leach to a certain depth of the crystal, but the problem is that the overall efficiency that lead is leached out of the crystal is relatively low, and consuming even a small amount of lead is dangerous.
For example, the crystal decanter I own has an interior surface area of about 420 cm^2 and it is 24% lead. That means in the first 0.5 mm of the inside of my decanter, there is over 66 grams of lead (lead crystal that is 24% lead has a density of about 3.15 g/cm^-3). Based on the higher rate above of leaching 5,000 micrograms in 4 months, it would take over 4400 years and over 13000 bottles of cheap liquor to remove the lead in just the first half of a millimeter of a 24% lead crystal decanter.
Long term storage, especially spirits is a no no.
