Berserkers,
Need some of yoru expert experienced buying advice. Last night I managed to acquire a couple of bottles of a rare sweet beauty from the SAQ, the Domaine Sigalas 2003 Vinsanto, a rare Vin Santo style wine from Greece as opposed to Italy.
However, when I got home I noticed that the cork on one was pushing up out of the bottle and into the foil, the classic telltale sign of a wine being improperly stored and exposed to heat that cooked it enough to cause a reaction to push the cork out of the bottle. My questions for you much more frequent shoppers are these:
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The other bottle looks perfectly fine from the exterior. It could be fine, or it could also be bad. In your purchasing experiences, if one bottle in a lot is bad what is the probability the others are also bad? Should I return the “good” bottle for a refund along wih the bad one?
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There are of course other bottles of this wine available at the SAQ store. Should I exchange the bad one for a good one? Or just give up on them altogether and return them both?
I have only ever had one other bad purchase from the SAQ, a corked Hafner 2001 Scheurebe icewine, yet the other bottle I purchased from them stored in presumably the same conditions at the store was perfectly fine. However, it will be $100 down the drain if all the bottle sare in fact bad and since I live in Toronto it’s not like I can just bring them back to the SAQ for a return easily. The longer the age of the bottle, of course, the higher the probability it has gone bad.
Waddya think? Place my faith in the wine gods or move on to something else? What have you guys found in your experiences? Does a bad bottle indicate complete avoidance or should I take a chance on the other bottles?
My concern here would be that its companion bottles from the same shop were exposed to the same hazards, and therefore suspect. If the issue was something like a corked bottle that (while of course it can indicate a broader hygiene issue across bottles from a particular winery) is typically bottle-specific, I wouldn’t sweat it. But if in fact the suspicious bottle has been cooked in-transit or in the store, I’d have to think the bottles it likely traveled with were treated to the same neglect.
I can’t recall a bottle with a lightly elevated cork that was obviously heat damaged, and all my overtly cooked bottles in recent memory looked fine from the outside. I don’t think there is nearly the correlation we want there to be. My guess is that the majority of raised corks is a bottling line issue, and that most heat damaged wine isn’t apparent from a visual inspection of the bottle.
Thanks for the advice, guys. One question Theodore: of the bottles that you had with a cork that was lightly elevated, how was the wine itself? BTW, you are correct to use the term lightly elevated as the cork is in fact just that, only lightly elevated enough to touch the foil but still very noticeable with a good look.
It always bothers me but I think the wines are fine. One producer who I drink a lot of seem to have this issue year-in, year-out, where the top of the cork bulges over the lip of the glass and gives the appearance of a pushed cork. The wines (and corks) are always in good shape, with no other indications of heat.
In a recently bottled wine (which presumably the OP’s is not) I would not sweat too much a slightly elevated cork unless there are other signs of leakage or damage. Bottling lines try to get them all uniform and try to catch and recork outliers, but they’re not perfect.
However, if your bottle did taste heat damaged, I would assume all of that wine you purchased that day has a common history.
I mostly agree with the above, esp that it can happen at bottling. Howevah… is the cork protruding 1/16th of an inch… or 1/4? The former could be bottling variance. The latter… is more of an issue.
I’d also consider how much these were and whether, if they were off, it would be a big financial hit or not.
1/16th of an inch, definitely not 1/4. They are $55 which doesn’t seem like a lot but two of them being bad would be a hit.