Reading the bottle.

Zone one — The closure

Every serious inspection starts at the top. The cork and its capsule are the bottle's only moving parts — the seal on which everything below depends — and they are where heat, pressure and time leave their first testimony. Auction houses compress this zone into a private shorthand — SOS, SPC, SDC, CC — the letters varying slightly from house to house. This chapter spells the language out.

Protruding cork

A cork standing proud of the glass lip, sometimes only a millimetre or two; under an intact capsule, a top that looks domed or lifted rather than flat. In auction shorthand: PC or SPC.

Wine expands with heat. Sustained heat — above roughly ninety degrees Fahrenheit, the low thirties Celsius — can build enough pressure inside the bottle to drive the cork upward — among the most telling visual evidence heat can leave. Freezing does the same thing from the other direction: water expands as ice, with the same result. Either way, the seal has been worked by forces it was never meant to hold, and it often travels with a second witness, seepage.

A slightly eased cork on a bottle of great age can be the ordinary softening of decades, and buyers of old wine tolerate it in an otherwise coherent bottle. It does not, by itself, prove the wine is damaged — heat harms wine invisibly long before it moves a cork, and some cooked bottles look perfect.

The reading: the bottle has been somewhere it should never have been. Ask where — and ask what else agrees.

Depressed cork

The opposite silhouette: a cork sitting visibly below the rim, a shallow well of shadow inside the neck; under capsule, a top that dips instead of doming. In the catalogues: DC or SDC.

Corks lose elasticity as they dry and age; a cork can also be driven low at bottling, or settle after decades of easing. The concern is not the position but the tension: a cork that has slackened may no longer press against the glass with the force a seal requires, and oxygen is patient. Inspectors test exactly this — a sound cork feels taut; one that withdraws further when pressed has surrendered.

A slightly depressed cork in an older bottle is common and widely tolerated; many collectors treat it as cosmetic when the fill is healthy and the capsule clean. It proves nothing alone. Deep depression in a young bottle is a different conversation.

The reading: position is a question; tension is the answer. Read it with the fill level, never without.

Seepage

Dried rivulets of wine at the base of the capsule; a crusted, sticky residue that hardens where it met the air; a capsule stuck fast to the glass that will not turn; sometimes a stain on the label aligned exactly with the trace above it. The most consequential letters in the auction code: SOS.

Wine has escaped past the cork. Heat is a frequent author — expansion forcing wine through the seal — but corks can fail without heat, from age or defect. The geometry tells the story: a trace descending from the closure belongs to this bottle; a splash from the side may belong to a broken neighbour. Fresh, active seepage is the loudest alarm a closed bottle can raise.

Slight, long-dried seepage on a bottle of great age is common enough that experienced buyers weigh it rather than flee it — against fill, colour and the rest of the bottle's coherence. It does not prove the wine is ruined. On a young bottle, it comes very close.

The reading: wine where no wine should be. The seal has already lost once; assume it can lose again.

Corroded capsule

The tin gone dull and mottled; a bloom of pale oxidation across the metal, heaviest at the folds and the lower rim. CC, in the catalogues — and on old bottles, one of their most frequent notes.

Most often: humidity — decades of it. Usually that means a cellar doing its job, though damp alone is not proof of good keeping. The sixty to seventy-five per cent moisture that keeps corks supple is precisely what weathers tin over the decades, and collectors of old wine expect a degree of corrosion on a bottle that has been kept well. Read alone, it is patina — the cellar signing its work. Read together with seepage residue at the capsule's base, it changes meaning: moisture from inside, not outside.

Corrosion proves nothing about the wine, in either direction. And its absence proves nothing either — though a capsule too pristine for a bottle's claimed age raises a different kind of question, one that belongs to identity rather than condition.

The reading: corrosion is weather, not wound — until it travels with wine. Then read the whole closure again.

Wrinkled, cut or damaged capsule

Fine wrinkles and buckles in the tin, as if the metal had flinched; tears, nicks, missing pieces; or a clean horizontal cut low on the capsule. A capsule that spins freely on the neck; or one glued immovably to the glass.

Each mark has its own author. Wrinkling and buckling correlate with heat — the closure swelling and settling beneath the tin. A loose, spinning capsule is usually nothing: adhesives dry out. A stuck capsule deserves attention: dried wine is one of the things that glue tin to glass. And a deliberate clean cut at the base is frequently the opposite of damage: the documented trace of an inspection, made to examine the cork and branded glass beneath — provenance work, visible.

The capsule is jewellery over the seal, not the seal itself. Cosmetic damage to it — nicks, tears, scuffs — says nothing about the wine if the cork and fill beneath are sound.

The reading: the capsule cannot hurt the wine, but it keeps the wine's diary. Learn which entries matter.

Mould on the cork

Beneath a lifted capsule, a thin dry veil of pale mould across the cork's top; sometimes a soft grey dusting on the glass or the capsule itself, the bloom of a humid room.

Almost always: the cellar, doing its job. The humidity that keeps a cork supple for decades will, in time, grow a harmless surface bloom on everything it touches. It sits on top of the closure and never meets the wine. Bottles emerging from old European cellars wear it routinely. The distinction that matters is texture: a dry, dusty veil is cellar signature; a dark, sticky, crusted deposit is not mould at all but seepage residue — and that belongs to a different entry.

Surface mould proves humidity, nothing more. It is not corked wine — TCA is chemistry, not a visible growth — and cleaning it away for presentation removes evidence of keeping, not a defect.

The reading: mould is the cellar's signature, not the wine's confession. Read the texture before the colour.

Zone two — The level

Fill level against age; the tide marks a hot journey leaves inside the neck. This chapter is being written — the guide is kept like the cellar, entry by entry. The glossary already holds the foundations: ullage and fill level.

Zone three — The wine, through the glass

Colour read against a light; haze against limpidity; sediment that rests, and sediment that flies. Forthcoming.

Zone four — The paper and the glass

Labels bleached by sun, stained by wine, freckled by good cellars; the glass itself. Forthcoming.

What this guide does not read

Condition is not identity, and neither is the wine. This guide does not taste anything, and it does not authenticate anything: a bottle can look impeccable and be wrong, and look weathered and be exactly what it claims. Identity — whether label, capsule, cork and glass agree with the producer's release — is its own discipline, and the first dimension of the Provenance Scorecard. A visual inspection reads risk and custody. The rest is said by the papers, and one day, by the glass.