I had a weird experience with a bottle of 1961 Ferrando Carema a few nights ago. Bottle appeared to be well stored except for a few breaks in the capsule, which I didn’t worry about given how old of a bottle it was. But when I removed the capsule, I found bits of this weird grainy kind of sandy powdery substance on the top of the cork. It’s all around the right side of the cork in the photo below. To me, it looked like insect feces. I didn’t see any bugs themselves, just what I think is their poop from long ago. Since the top of the cork was sunken a little below the lip of the bottle, I had a hard time removing it all to see the integrity of the cork underneath.
I was able to get the cork out in one piece with the Durand, soaked through about 75% of the way. But the wine was brown like mud and tasted dead. Hours and hours in the decanter didn’t really help.
I looked around online and there are a few reports here and there about cork moths and cork weevils, but I still don’t know what this is. What do you think? Did bugs eat this cork and ruin my wine? Given the age of the bottle, do you think the seller should refund me?
It does look like insect frass, but the cork doesn’t look excessively chewed on in the picture. What did it look like when you took it out? What is the provenance? When we were in Italy several years ago, we found an older Percalo in a wine shop at reasonable price so we were excited to try one with some age on it. The corked looked okay, but the wine looked and tasted like yours. Later, someone told us that an earthquake had caused extended power outages during the summer many years ago and cooked some wines in smaller shops. Made sense.
Here are the two photos I took of the cork. I didn’t bother taking a picture of the top or bottom of the cork, though in retrospect, that was dumb. The cork was quite soft, so both ends were pretty torn up by the time I got it out, even with the Durand. It would have been impossible to tell if there were little holes left from bugs.
But is this a common problem? I’d never heard of bugs eating wine corks and ruining wine before.
Thanks for sharing the pictures…but what a terrible color. Unfortunately, with these very old wines determining what exactly went wrong is hard. And I’m not even sure that it would have been reasonable at any point to expect - even under perfect conditions - a half century+ of vitality.
Before even opening the bottle I could’ve told you the wine was dead from the cradle picture alone.
Looks like high-quality cork and from what one can see from the picture, I see no obvious damage. Most likely the wine is just too old for its good / kept in non-optimal conditions.
We had several bottles like these in our Ferrando vertical. From my experience the Carema bottles of Ferrando tend to be more often off/dead than the Carema bottles of Produttori, but when they are on, they are miles better - Produttori di Carema wines can be very good, but they don’t seem to develop similar complexity with age.
That’s lead powder from the capsule degrading. Fairly common with older wines under lead. Clean that stuff off thoroughly with a damp paper towel. Unnecessary/avoidable big dose of toxin.
I’m sure this is much more likely to happen if there’s a little leakage (wouldn’t take much), as the acid would help etch away at the lead.
Edit to add I skipped to the 2nd pic and commented on that. The first pic clearly shows the capsule was etched through.
No idea if it’s just me, but… are we seriously talking about what may have gone wrong with a bottle that is 61years old? Every time you open a 61-year-old bottle, that’s between you and God. Literally all there is to it.
I don’t know about the ratio of good/bad bottles (can’t say I’ve had the same experience as you), but agree 100% with everything else.
I don’t know about the ratio of good/bad bottles (can’t say I’ve had the same experience as you), but agree 100% with everything else.
It’s hard to say how much more experience I have - my experience is based on two lengthy verticals of Produttori and one of Ferrando along with a handful of single bottles here and there, totaling to some 30-plus data points.
While there have been a few too old / off Produttori bottles, for the most part they have been still surprisingly alive for their age. Ferrando, OTOH, has been quite a gamble; unlike with Produttori bottles, we’ve always been holding our breath whether the Ferrando bottles are singing, long past their peak, or corked. While there has been a good number of impressive bottles, unfortunately the amount of duds has been bigger compared to Produttori, both in a relative and absolute number of bottles. And IIRC, all these bottles have been sourced from the same one or two sources.
Thanks everyone. I like the way Tvrtko put it- that these bottles are “between you and God”. Agreed. Just a few follow up questions;
What’s the give away from the cradle picture? I thought the bottle looked pretty good to me, other than the tattered capsule, which I didn’t make much of given the bottle’s age.
Of course. Bottles this old are always a gamble. I was specifically asking if the more experienced among you have seen what look like bug feces trapped between the top of the cork and the capsule. I’d never heard of that. And also if this could have compromised the cork integrity, knowing of course that there are lots of factors at play over the decades.
The bottle can look like it was recently dug out from a landfill and the wine can be still in absolutely gorgeous condition.
I just immediately checked the wine in the neck and it looked more syrupy-brown than red to me - even an old wine should retain some reddish color when you shine light through the bottle. Although my computer display’s color space might show colors incorrectly, that still looks like a wine I’d leave on the shelf, just in case. Not particularly promising.
I don’t see typical weevil damage from the cork pics. Most likely just a old bottle that didn’t last the test of time.
A FWIW, corrosion from old lead capsules usually leaves a white powdery build up under the capsule and on the glass. But if the wine seeped it would typically color it a brownish color from the oxidized wine. Very possible that is what you saw.
Sorry, Otto, I may have been a bit unclear, I didn’t mean to quantify my experience (or yours), just to say that whatever experience I’ve had (and I’ve definitely had a number of these over the years) was different from yours, simply meaning I’ve never had the impression that old PdC bottles were on average less of a gamble than Ferrando, for what it’s worth.
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