Opening an older bottle

Everything about an older bottle is more fragile than a young one: the cork, the wine, and the amount of time it will show well for.

The cork is the immediate problem. After fifteen or twenty years it loses elasticity and a conventional corkscrew is likely to push it through or pull the middle out of it. A two-pronged opener grips the cork against the neck instead of piercing it, which is the tool for the job.

The wine itself may be excellent, may be over, and may be excellent for half an hour and then fade. That last case is genuinely common with very old bottles and is the reason not to decant one hours ahead: the air that opens a young wine can finish an old one.

Expectations are worth setting too. An old wine has lost its primary fruit and gained tertiary character — mushroom, leather, dried fruit, forest floor — and a drinker expecting the flavour of a young wine will read that as a fault. It is the point of ageing, not a failure of it.