Posted on 09/05/2025 8:04:40 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Heavens to Betsy! The cork fell in! Throw it out. You might get microplastics or such.
A lawyer once gave me a bottle of Glenlivet single malt scotch for Christmas and I opened it right away to see how it tasted. I don’t drink much so that bottle lasted until the following Christmas when the same lawyer gave me another bottle.
I had two bottles of prewar Scotch from my dad who had diabetes and had quit drinking. One was a ceramic jug of Red Hackle and the other was a bottle of Haig and Haig Pinch.
I opened the Red Hackle last year and the cork crumbled but the whiskey was intact, and I filtered it and put it in a bitter bottle. Tasted good. After I decanted it and waited 6 months it tasted really good.
This Christmas, I will open the Pinch!
bitter bottle = better bottle
This ranch was where John Graves wrote his book; Good Bye To A River.
The owners said Graves had a vineyard and made his own wine at the ranch.
In the crawl space of one building, I found multiple cases of wine bottles which the bottles were stored on their side to keep the corks wet.
Rats and mice had chewed the corks until they dripped and most likely drank the wine.
I told the owners what I found and that all bottles were emptied. Said I could keep a bottle, but Graves did not put his name on any of the labels, so there was no providence.
Everything was left in place.
My parents owned a liquor store but didn’t drink. They had a small cupboard that had a few bottles they’d taken when they sold the store. I opened a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that had sat on the shelf for 45 years. They say whisky didn’t age any more once it has been bottled, but that was some of the smoothest hooch I’ve ever had
“...when he went to open it, he found the cork had completely crumbled.”
This can happen to any alcohol and whisky is no different. Whiskey does not get better with age once it is in the bottle; the aging process stops when the spirit is bottled, as the flavors and characteristics are developed through contact with oak barrels, not through oxidation or further interaction from the bottle itself. While unopened whiskey will not go bad if stored properly, its flavor profile will remain the same as when it was bottled.
One of the main p0roblems with getting a good bottle of wine is the steward that opens it. When he/she hands you the cork make sure it is whole. And for God’s sake don’t smell the cork as you will smell what is on the hands of the steward, not the wine. And you know where the cork has been but not the hands.
To properly store whiskey, keep bottles upright to prevent the high alcohol content from eroding the cork. Store bottles in a cool, dark place away from direct sunlight and significant temperature fluctuations to protect the liquid from heat damage and light-induced degradation.
For opened bottles, minimize air exposure by keeping them sealed tightly or transferring to a smaller decanter, and for opened bottles with real corks, you may want to gently tip them every few months to keep the cork moist and prevent it from drying out.
wy69
Good story.
I have been to the Inglenook Winery in NAPA many times and have gone into their “caves” to see the aging wines. They told us a story at one turn looking into a room that had stacked wines in it and the labels had fallen off from age we were told. They told us this room had been buried in a cave in and uncovered with expansion around 100 years later.
The claim now is that that isn’t true. But I saw the room and it was glassed off so we couldn’t get into it to protect the bottles on the racks that had more dust on them than a cowboy riding drag for a couple of days. And the bid on these bottles started at $6k a bottle. Inglenook denies this but they did have a bottle of 1941 Inglenook Cabernet Sauvignon go at auction for $27K.
wy69
So nobody noticed a bunch of drunken mice or rats staggering around?
I don’t like that meme. It is my alma mater.
Every time I see that GIF, it reminds me of this:
I think this is one of my favorite cartoons of all time, as I cannot even count the number of "Say, what's a mountain goat doing way up in a cloud bank?" moments I have had in my lifetime!
Heck, sorry...I would remove the image if I could!
Oh, I don’t mind. I have friends from ut, a&m, and ou who send it to me all the time.
Ahhhh. I understand. They are poking at you. Hehe, when I used to watch NFL, I was a Redskins fan back in the early Seventies, and when I joined the USN, I got constant digs from Cowboys fans, who were quite vocal, and their team usually got the upper hand...
Liquor store near me closed about 20 years ago. The owner inherited it from his father. He had, behind the counter, several bottles of potato whiskey, made in WW2, when grain was rationed, which he kept on display, but would not sell. Don’t know what happened to them when the contents were inventoried.
bitter bottle=empty bottle
I know that guy. He’s Sir Richard Pumpaloafe, the demented bread boffer. Never accept a sandwich from him.
SNL had a skit about soaking corks. For immature adults only: https://youtu.be/Deqx-Xb-yHY?feature=shared.
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