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By Author: janetjosly
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Buying Older Bottles of Wine from 67Wine.com

The pro's and cons of acquiring older bottles of wine in a nutshell.

Every bottle of wine is its own little organic chemistry experiment. The older a bottle gets, the longer numerous physical and chemical reactions have had to occur.

The first thing |The very first thing} you ought to notice is the overall condition of your bottle. Is the label in good condition? Badly torn labels indicate, to say the very least, some careless handling in the bottle’s past.A moldy or mildewed label can in reality be a positive, showing that it had been kept in a humid environment.

The next thing it is best to notice may be the fill level of the bottle. It will be inevitable that as time passes, a percentage of the wine will evaporate. All wines with lower fill levels might have problems with oxidation, as more oxygen in contact with the wine will speed up that negative process.

Wines stored at higher temperatures may also age faster than wines kept at a proper temperature, and a wine stored in too warm a place will often pass from maturity into old age before ...
... expected.

In taking a look at an older bottle, the most obvious chemical reaction taking place would be the formation of sediment. Tannin molecules bind together in long chains until they become too heavy to remain in solution, at which point they fall out as sediment. If you cannot any see sediment in a red wine over twenty years of age, you would have to suspect something is not right with that bottle.

As wine ages, its color will become lighter and less red. Again, this is totally expected, and you will find a 50 year old bottle that shows the color of a young wine must be suspect.

Positive reactions also occur, or there would be little reason to age wine. The molecules that produce the fruity flavors of young wines combine, break apart, and recombine many times over time, forming new flavors.

You can also get negative chemical reactions which could occur in bottles that look to be perfectly fine. The very first of these is for your wine to be "corked".

A bottle can be contaminated by bacteria, from any variety of sources. The most typical contaminant is known as Brett (short for the name of the bacteria that causes it), and causes an odor known politely as "barnyard".

To summarize, the primary risks are oxidation, cork contamination, and bacterial contamination.

The joys of older bottles are many, and for a lot of people, well worth the risks.

Clearly, the best way to enjoy older bottles is to purchase them from a reputable wine merchant, such as 67 Wine.

Loire Wine, Rhone Wine