Guide
How to judge an old bottle of Bordeaux
The label tells you what the bottle claims to be. The glass, the capsule, and the paperwork tell you what it has been through.
The short answer
Look at 3 things, in order: the fill level, the capsule and cork, and the paperwork. Top shoulder is normal past 15 years; from mid shoulder down the risk rises fast. A bottle with no history can be sound, but nobody can vouch for it.
How far the wine has fallen
Wine evaporates slowly through the cork, and the gap it leaves behind, the ullage, is the first thing an auction house describes. In a Bordeaux bottle it is measured against the neck and the shoulder. These are the readings of Tennants, the auction house:
| Level | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| High fill | The level of a young wine |
| Into neck | Very good at any age, outstanding past 10 years |
| Top shoulder | Normal for any Bordeaux over 15 years old |
| Upper shoulder | Acceptable at 20 years, exceptional in vintages before 1950 |
| Mid shoulder | Not abnormal at 30 to 40 years, but the cork is probably weakening and there is some risk |
| Low shoulder | Risky |
| Below low shoulder | Normally undrinkable |
What the capsule and cork give away
Auction catalogs use a short vocabulary worth knowing: corroded capsule, signs of seepage, slightly depressed cork. Seepage means wine has come past the cork, and wine that has come out means air has had a way in. Each of these is a line in the catalog for a reason. A bottle that carries several of them together deserves the closest look.
Provenance, the life on paper
Provenance is the bottle’s storage history: who bought it, where it was kept, how it traveled. The best case is a wine that came from the château into a known cellar and stayed there. Catalogs flag OWC, original wood case, when the wine is still in the case it left the estate in. A bottle with no history can still be sound. It is simply a bottle nobody can vouch for.
Before buying, ask for photos of the fill, the capsule, and the label; ask for the importer strip or the auction lot history; and prefer releases that come straight from the château.
A new cork is only as good as its proof
Some estates top up and recork old bottles from their own cellars. Lafite does it when a cork grows too dry. The bottle is opened under a sterile hood, topped up with the same vintage, given a drop of bisulfite and a layer of argon, and recorked. Topping up uses about 1 bottle for every 50 or 60. In 2024 Lafite was recorking its 1989.
It stopped offering the service to private owners in the 2000s, for legal reasons, and very few châteaux offer it. A recorked bottle is therefore only as good as the proof that the château, and not someone else, did the work.
The bottle was real
The fakes follow the money, into rare and expensive wines. Rudy Kurniawan was sentenced in New York on August 7, 2014, to 10 years in prison. He blended cheaper wines to imitate expensive ones, poured them into empty bottles of rare wines, sealed them with corks, and dressed them in labels he made himself. The bottle was real. What was in it was not.
Estates fight back at the bottle. Lafite uses Prooftag, a capsule seal with a numbered code that authenticates each bottle. It has been on every bottle of its grand vin (the estate’s first wine) since the 2009 vintage, and on
Where to go next
Sources: Tennants auctioneers, condition and ullage · Heritage Auctions, key to wine condition descriptions and bottle sizes · Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite), decanting or recorking · U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, Rudy Kurniawan sentenced (August 7, 2014) · Decanter, all Lafite bottles to carry Prooftag