I have a 2016 Chiara Boshcis Barolo Via Nuova that I bid from the Acker Weekly Web auction. I just noticed that the cap seems to bloat up when I transfer it to a new fridge. Is that considered a protruding cork? I stored in my wine fridge as soon as I took it home. I was planning to keep this bottle for many years. I have other Chiara’s bottles. The cap don’t look like this.
Yeah not a good sign IMO.
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Looks like maybe the cork popped up and then someone pushed it back down. That’s what you have to worry about with the wrinkled capsule.
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The only way to be certain is to cut the capsule.
The auction page should have mentioned any bottle notes. I would screenshot it and contact the auction house if you are worried it is damaged and are considering a refund.
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Or that might be just a bottle where the cork didn’t enter fully. I mean I would encounter dozens of such bottles every day when I was working in a wine shop.
Protruding cork would be typically something very obvious. If it’s almost level with the lip, it’s impossible to tell - it can be that it has been pushed up from the inside but it’s perfectly normal to never have been deeper than that.
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Agreed. In milder climates such sights aren’t especially rare, and would simply not be a worry. However in warmer climate countries, it does open up the fears of wines being subjected to sustained high temperatures.
Are those fears reasonable? Who knows, but I’d understand why someone would take the view that it’s not worth any perceived additional risk.
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Is the opposite bad? A cork that is intruding/depressed (don’t know the word).
Sometimes. There’s quite a few spirited discussions in various threads around here. In an old bottle, a depressed cork can indicate a poor seal or maltreatment just as much as a raised cork.
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If you regularly buy, handle, etc wines and a cork looks or feels different to you, it probably is. That doesn’t indicate that the wine is bad necessarily — sometimes corks are either slightly high or slightly low from the bottling line from day 1 — but I’d trust your intuition (and yes, it looks high to me as well).
The more interesting question is when it happened. Do you have pictures from the web auction? If it happened in transit from the auction house to you (or they can claim it did), you’re probably SOL. If their own photos match yours and they didn’t note the raised cork in the condition notes, you have a good case for a refund IMO.
The words you are looking for are concave and convex.
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I come from simple origins and use innie and outie.
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I knew the listing from the auction didn’t mention anything about the cap / cork. However, I didn’t even remember if the cap looked like this at the time when I took delivery of the bottle. Lesson learned. I gotta examine the bottles from the auction house before I put them away in storage.
Depressed is the term.
And, Yes, it can be troublesome.
Those words really apply to curves/curves surfaces.
I was told capsules are annoying, wasteful, and serve no purpose.
Is it? I wonder if I can remove the capsule and examine the cork. If it’s fine, I would like to continue to age the wine.
I don’t see any wrinkles on the foil, which would be obvious if the cork was pushed back down.
I’m with Otto - it very well could be the way it was corked. I visited this estate well over 20 years ago, and don’t remember if they hand bottle with a small machine or use a big modern one that bottles in bulk.
I would take the chance and cellar it. Too good of an estate to NOT give it a chance.
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This estate uses a large bottling machine now.
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