Pushed Cork? Opinions please!

[Stewart_Johnson]

I’ll second Ken’s take. That cork looks within the margin of error for hand corking.

[John_Morris]

@KatrinaBI

@Al Osterheld

When wine first gets below its freezing temperature, it freezes a little bit and then stops because the freezing point of the remaining liquid is lowered (more water than alcohol freezes, so the remaining liquid is higher percentage of alcohol). If the temperature drops a bit more, a little more freezes, then it stops, etc. So, corks can be pushed a little or a lot depending on how cold they got, they won’t always look like Karen’s unless they got cold enough. Temperatures in the teens are enough to partially freeze wine. Of course, the wine usually won’t get as cold as outside temperatures.

So, the slight bit of pushing might have been caused by partial freezing. But, if it was, I wouldn’t worry very much about the impact on the wine. There might have been a little bit of oxygen that got past the cork when the wine melted (since cork didn’t retract), but not very much. As far as the wine itself, freezing a little and melting doesn’t do much except possibly cause some acid to precipitate as was mentioned (as would getting down near the freezing point but not actually freezing any of it).

-Al

Really useful info, Al. Thanks so much. So I guess I can conclude that the wine was probably very slightly frozen but that it probably won’t impact the wine’s flavors in the near term. I’ll cue these for drinking in the next couple of years (and source subsequent vintages from West coast vendors despite the added expense).

I was a bit surprised to read that even the roughly 12-14% alcohol of wine is enough to lower the freezing temperature substantially – to ~20F/-6C to freeze:

Freezing Wine

What temperature does bottled wine freeze at?

[Al_Osterheld]

Yes, much above 20F you probably don’t need to worry. As you get below 20F (wine temperature which may not be same as outside temperature), you may need to worry, depending on alcohol and other solutes. If the wine reached the mid-teens, not very much of it would freeze, but it doesn’t take very much to move a cork a little bit.

I have no idea whether Katrina’s wine very slightly froze. My points were simply that mid-teen temperatures are low enough that it may have, partially frozen wine doesn’t necessarily display grossly pushed corks, but that I doubt it matters very much even if it did.

-Al