I'm looking for feedback on an unfortunate discovery my wife made today while doing some end of year cleaning.
We moved into a new house in May 2000 and in the course of moving some of our wine somehow was put into a four-bottle styrofoam shipping box marked "empty bottles." During our unpacking, we apparently stuffed the box in the corner of our basement and forgot about it. Today she discovered the box containing 3 (not empty!) bottles of 1996 Viansa Prindelo (a blended red that was in high regard in its day). It was stored on its side the entire time, and the basement is reasonably cool (~60 +/- 5 degrees).
Unfortunately two of the three bottles showed seepage around the corks. I opened one and it was clearly bad (very bitter and acidic), so I figured I'd go ahead and open the one that was intact; to my surprise it was also very acidic though not necessarily bitter (and did not smell like the wet cardboard smell of a corked wine). My questions then are:
1. Is it reasonable to complain to the winery about the leakage of the corks (and should I expect them to, say, offer me a bottle of the current vintage)?
2. Is 8 years an unreasonably long time to expect an unopened bottle to keep, albeit under less than perfect conditions, in the case of the non-leaking bottle?
3. Assuming 8 years is a fair aging time, what would have made the unopened bottle so undrinkable given that it was a very smooth and velvety wine at its initial issue?
Thanks for your insight and comments!
That's a tough one. Basement storage of the wine like you noted should be perfectly fine. My cellar is just the corner closet of my basement and my wines have been great over the past 10 years like this. The temp ranges from the same as yours very slowly over the course of the year.
It almost sounds like your bottles could have frozen at some point to cause the cork problem? My only cork leakage occured that way. The other problem could have been extremely low humidity drying out the outside of the corks. Do you live in the arid southwest?
I doubt very serously that the winery would take your request to get new bottles this far from the purchase date but you can always try.
It is completly futille toi demand anything of the producer, I wouldN,t consider freezing.......more so overheating which would change the structeur for the wine more rapidly, there is also additional fermentation...poorly tended to wine, not stabilized as well. GOOD wine will stand the tests of time at 60..or from 52- 70. White's can even dip to ice particals in the wine and still fair not too bad, Be Well my wine drinking friend..............
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