As an addendum to the previous post, I wanted to share something interesting which happened over the weekend. A friend was kind enough to open a bottle of 1988 Bonny Doon Le Cigare Volant which she had brought to dinner. I inquired about the history of the bottle and was told by the owner that she had purchased it upon release from the winery tasting room (she is from Santa Cruz). She had been the bottle’s only owner, and it had been stored horizontally, in her cellar, and in the original wooden box for the duration. The bottle was even still wrapped in the original red packing tissue when she brought it out. As far as provenance goes, it is hard to establish a chain-of-custody which is much better than that. However, she admitted that it had been moved several times and had not always been stored in 100% ideal conditions. This included a couple of power-outages on warm days, and a few seismic temblors.
Visually appraising the bottle, I noted that the capsule, label, and glass were all in pristine condition. The foil had no corrosion, there was no apparent cork movement (concave/convex shape to the capsule head), and there was no seepage whatsoever. If the label had faded at all, it was an imperceptible amount. There was also less than 1 cm of visible ullage.
I was asked to do the opening honors. Using a handy waiter’s friend, I carefully cut around the top of the pristine foil and peeled it back…
Low-and-behold, the interior was completely corroded and the cork was damp to the touch!
Although I was sans-camera at the time, I kept the capsule. Below are the exterior and interior shots.
1988 Bonny Doon Le Cigare Volant Capsule - Exterior
1988 Bonny Doon Le Cigare Volant Capsule - Interior. Note the heavier corrosion due to seepage in the bottom left.
Although I have seen this before with older bottles, this scenario intrigued me on a number of levels. For one, although the signs were potentially worrisome, the wine turned out to be just fine. It was clearly beginning to work itself out of the bottle by seeping around the cork (which I did successfully remove, but which fell apart immediately), but the wine itself was not damaged. Secondly, the capsule was corroding from the inside and not the outside (at least visibly). This made me curious as to how capsule corrosion manifests itself.
Do capsules always corrode from the interior to the exterior? Or vice versa? Or do they corrode at equal rates from both directions, but it is the addition of external elements (other than oxygen) which accelerates the process from one direction – in this case, a minute amount of liquid? Would the interior of this capsule have been fine had the bottle not been moved two or three times? Maybe this is always due to the decomposing cork?
If any one has any thoughts on this, or if you’ve experienced similar scenarios with identical or opposing outcomes, please share them in the comments.
Despite what I uncovered, and even after twenty-plus years, the wine inside was in excellent condition and still very much alive. Kudos to winemaker Randall Grahm and his blending skill for this outcome.
