Bottle condition

An old bottle tells you how it has lived. Learning to read it takes minutes, and once you can, the whole business becomes far less mysterious. This page explains what we look at, what each term means, what we reject, and where the honest limits of any assessment lie.

None of this is a trade secret. Any competent merchant checks the same things. We set them out because you are spending real money on an object you cannot inspect yourself, and you are entitled to know what we looked at on your behalf.

Fill level

Fill level, or ullage as the trade calls it, is the single most useful signal on an old bottle. Wine works its way past the cork very slowly over decades. How much has gone tells you a great deal about the quality of that cork and the conditions the bottle has been kept in. A cool, humid, undisturbed cellar loses very little. A warm loft loses a lot.

Levels are described by where the wine sits against the shape of the bottle. Bordeaux bottles have defined shoulders, so the vocabulary is precise. Burgundy and Champagne bottles slope, so those are measured in centimetres down from the base of the cork instead.

• Into neck — the wine reaches up into the neck itself. Exceptional for anything over thirty years old, and usually a sign of a first-rate cork and cold, stable storage. On a 1970s bottle it is unusual. On a 1950s bottle it is remarkable, and generally means the wine was recorked by the estate, which should be disclosed.
• Top shoulder — level with the very top of the shoulder, where the neck begins. Normal and good for a bottle of twenty to forty years. For anything from the 1960s or earlier, this is about as well as you can reasonably hope.
• High shoulder — slightly below the top of the shoulder. Entirely acceptable for older bottles and completely normal for the 1950s and 1960s. This is where most genuinely old wine sits, and it is not a defect. Plenty of bottles at high shoulder are in fine health.
• Mid shoulder — halfway down the shoulder. More has been lost than we would like. For a bottle from the 1940s or 1950s it is not unusual and does not condemn it, but the risk of oxidation is real and it should be reflected in the price. We list mid shoulder bottles only for pre-1960 vintages, and we always say so plainly.
• Below mid shoulder — we do not sell these. Whatever the label, whatever the year, whatever the price.

Two cautions. Fill level is evidence, not proof. A bottle at top shoulder can still be spoiled if it spent a summer at thirty degrees, because heat can cook a wine without leaving much of a mark on the fill. And older bottles were filled less precisely than modern ones, so a 1947 that started marginally low is not the same as one that has lost the equivalent volume since. This is where provenance does the work that fill level cannot.

Labels

A perfect label on a sixty-year-old bottle should make you suspicious, not pleased.

Wine cellars are humid by design, because dry air shrinks corks. Humidity is exactly what paper labels do not like. Over decades, a label kept properly will discolour, stain, spot with mould, cockle at the edges, and sometimes lift where the glue has failed. That is what correct storage does to paper. A crisp white label on a 1955 usually means the bottle was kept somewhere too dry, or the label has been replaced.

So: staining is not a fault. Nor is light mould spotting, edge wear, or a small tear. Seepage stains, the dark run from beneath the capsule, tell you the bottle once got warm enough to push wine past the cork. That is worth knowing, but an old dried stain on a bottle that has been stable ever since is common, and not disqualifying on its own.

What does concern us is a label missing so much text that we cannot confirm the producer or vintage, a label that looks wrong for the period, since the typography, paper and printing methods of the 1950s are distinctive, or one that has clearly been removed and reapplied. Those bottles do not ship.

We photograph the label of every bottle and describe its wear in the condition report. If a stain would bother you in a gift, ask before ordering and we will show you exactly what you would be getting.

Capsule and cork

The capsule is the foil or wax over the top. Its job on an old bottle is mostly protective, but it carries information.

Corrosion and dulling on a lead or tin capsule are normal and expected. Lead was standard until the early 1990s and it ages visibly, so a dull, pitted capsule on a 1960s bottle is a good sign rather than a bad one. Minor splitting where the cork has moved is normal too. What we look for is whether the capsule is original and undisturbed. One that has been cut, lifted and pressed back down means somebody has been at the cork, and unless there is estate documentation of a recorking, that is a serious question mark. We check the seam, the crimp at the lip, and whether the embossing matches the period.

Beneath it, the cork. We cannot see it without destroying the seal, so we assess it indirectly. Pressing gently on the capsule top tells us whether the cork has risen, which suggests the bottle has been heated at some point. A cork pushed up against the capsule, or one that has dropped into the neck: either fails.

Corks have a working life. Beyond forty or fifty years, even a good one is losing its elasticity. That is why estates run recorking programmes, and why an estate-recorked bottle with proper documentation is often in better shape than an original-cork bottle of the same age. Where a bottle has been recorked we always say so, along with the year it was done and by whom. It is a mark of care, not something to hide.

Provenance and storage

Provenance is the bottle's history: who has owned it, where it has been stored, and how well that can be evidenced. It is less visible than fill level and often matters more.

The best case is an unbroken line from the estate or a long-standing merchant, with records to show it. Next best is a private cellar we know, where we can see the conditions ourselves: temperature, humidity, whether the bottles lie undisturbed, whether the room is dark and quiet. A cellar holding twelve to fourteen degrees year-round has done more for a wine than any amount of careful handling since.

What we treat with caution: bottles with no history at all, bottles that have changed hands repeatedly around the auction circuit, and anything that has crossed a hot country in an unrefrigerated lorry. None of these is an automatic rejection, but they lower what we will pay and they go into the condition report.

We also weigh provenance against the bottle in front of us. A wine with strong documentation and a modest fill level is a better prospect than a mystery bottle that happens to look pristine.

What we reject outright

No negotiation on any of these. Fill below mid shoulder, at any age. Any sign of a tampered capsule or an undocumented recorking. A cork that has risen or dropped. Active seepage, meaning wine escaping now rather than an old dried stain. A label that cannot be confirmed as correct for the producer and vintage. Any bottle whose vintage we cannot verify against at least one independent source. Bottles from cellars we have not vetted, however good the wine sounds.

Roughly one bottle in fifteen that we go to inspect does not ship. When that happens on your order, we refund you in full at once and come back with alternatives. The How it works page explains that process.

Why nobody guarantees the taste

Here is the honest limit of everything above.

We can tell you that the fill is at top shoulder, the capsule is original, the label is right for the period, and the bottle spent fifty years in a Burgundian cellar at twelve degrees. All of that is real information and all of it improves the odds. None of it tells you what the wine tastes like, because the only way to find that out is to open it, and opening it ends the thing you bought.

Cork is a natural material and it varies from bottle to bottle within the same case. Two bottles from the same 1961 lot, stored side by side since the 1960s, can be entirely different: one alive, the other flat and brown. That is not a failure of assessment. It is what happens to wine sealed with a piece of tree bark for longer than most people have been alive.

This is why we sell everything from before 1990 as a collectible item, without a guarantee of drinkability. Any merchant who promises you that a sixty-year-old wine will taste good is either inexperienced or careless with the truth.

In practice this matters less than it sounds. People opening a bottle from a birth year are marking an occasion, not scoring a wine. Stand it upright for a day or two, decant it gently, pour it carefully off the sediment, and take it as it comes. Sometimes it is extraordinary. Sometimes it is a faded, gentle thing that still smells of the year it was made. Both are worth the evening.

If you have a question about a specific bottle, write to info@anno.wine. We will send photographs and a full condition report before you commit to anything.