News

Alan MacLennan's prescription from the clinic wasn't what he'd hoped: Drink two bottles of expensive wine as soon as possible.

For a wine buff such as the 47-year-old Vancouverite, that kind of directive might sound like a dream come true. But the beverages in question were two very particular bottles from his cellar, and he was being informed they were on the oenological equivalent of life support.

"This one is a bit maderized; it's been heated," pronounced Peter Gago, chief winemaker with Penfolds, the Australian winery known for some of the Southern Hemisphere's most expensive and cellar-worthy reds. "Do you remember where you bought that one?"

Mr. Gago was referring to a 1980 Bin 80A Cabernet Shiraz, one of 15 wines Mr. MacLennan had brought in, swaddled in bubble wrap and nestled in a hard-shell crate, to be assessed at a free Penfolds "recorking clinic" last Friday at Vancouver's Four Seasons Hotel.

The idea: to examine the bottles' condition, open and taste them if necessary, then top them up with the current vintage of the wine and reseal them - using squirts of inert nitrogen gas at each stage to protect the delicate liquid from wine-spoiling oxygen.

By having an old, decomposing cork replaced with a new one, the wine effectively gets a new lease on life and is better able to continue aging gracefully.

Producers of some of the world's other legendary reds, notably top Bordeaux houses such as Château Lafite Rothschild, stage similar clinics from time to time. Mostly, they are limited in scale and held at the château or in London or New York.

Penfolds, by contrast, travels to such additional cities as San Francisco, Houston, Zurich, Toronto and, most recently, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vancouver. More than 85,000 Penfolds wines have been recorked since the program started in 1991.

To his dismay, Mr. MacLennan's prized stash received two failing grades, one for a 1970 Grange, typically worth more than $300 at auction in North America, and another for the aforementioned Bin 80A. Neither passed the exacting standards of Mr. Gago's formidable palate.

So, rather than being resealed and certified with the winemaker's signature on a counterfeit-proof seal (ensuring a high resale value), they were recorked and ignominiously stickered with a white dot, Penfolds' version of a scarlet letter.

"This one gets the dreaded white dot, the dot of death," Mr. Gago ribbed, trying to lighten the mood after delivering Mr. MacLennan's bad news about the 1970 Grange, bought years ago at auction in Australia for a forgotten sum.

"Now I'll have to go shopping again," Mr. MacLennan said, facetiously.

His were among 191 bottles carried into the Vancouver clinic by avid collectors to be assessed by Mr. Gago and Steve Lienert, Penfolds' senior maker of red wine. To qualify, the bottles could be from any line in the winery's range, from the $15 Koonunga Hill series to the iconic $300 Grange, but they had to be at least 15 years old. In some cases, where corks appeared to be in good condition and fill levels were still high up into the necks of the bottles, the wines were left untouched. But in most cases they were carefully uncorked, with a tiny pour taken for sampling.

It takes Mr. Gago an astonishingly brief moment of focus to make a categorical assessment.

"That needs to be drunk" over the next few months, he said of another of Mr. MacLennan's Granges, from 1979. "It just gets there by its fingernails - just. ... I'm being brutally honest here."

Recorking clinics are a forensic laboratory for poor storage - by far the biggest killer of old wine - a sort of CSI: Wine Cellar.

A warm space can start to spoil wine after just a year or two. Lack of humidity is another culprit. Above-ground rooms, typically well below the ideal threshold of 75 per cent relative humidity, create too much of a differential between the contents and the air outside, causing wine to evaporate through the porous cork.

And contrary to popular belief, even the best-made wines can degrade soon after they're bottled - even if stored under ideal conditions. The problem lies in the cork, a natural tree bark that can spoil wine because of random flaws in its fibre or because of chemical taint from contact with chlorine. Given enough time, say 30 years or more, most corks decompose, losing their seal and gradually exposing the wine to oxygen.

That's why Mr. Gago used not one but two Teflon-coated corkscrews to open three bottles of rare 1962 Penfolds Bin 60A Cabernet Shiraz, brought in by Sebastien Le Goff, general manager and sommelier of Vancouver's Lumière restaurant.

Driving two helixes into the cork helps create more leverage and structural integrity as the fragile bark is drawn out.

Repeatedly referred to by esteemed critics as the greatest Australian wine ever made, the 1962 Bin 60A has a going price at auction of about $4,000 a bottle. Just 425 cases of 12 bottles were made.

"That's what a real, top-end 60A palate is like," he said of Mr. Le Goff's third bottle.

Mr. Le Goff said he plans to return all three bottles to Lumière's cellar, where they are listed at $4,500 on the wine list, a bargain at just $500 above the going retail auction price.

"Wines are meant to be drunk," he said. "I don't operate a museum. I operate a restaurant. I would be more than happy to open them for a guest willing to spend that kind of money." Then, he added with a wry smile, "as long as I can have a couple of ounces of it."

It used to be that auction bidders undervalued wines that had been recorked. But with greater publicity surrounding recorking clinics, and growing sophistication among consumers, auction houses now tend to expect slightly higher prices for wines that have been through clinics because they have been certified as being in good condition.

That's why Mr. MacLennan brought in his wines, to get an assessment of their quality and value. And it's why he was nervous in the waiting room.

"I was scared to death. You spend a lot of money on these things [so] to find out that they get the white dot of shame is a bit of a trauma."

Paradoxically, Mr. Gago says, the white-dot rejection is a relief to some collectors, who see it as an excuse to finally pull the cork and enjoy, even if the wine isn't up to snuff.

"People actually like [the white dot] option quite often rather than having it certified, because you're literally giving them permission to drink the wine," Mr. Gago said. "It's ironic. We get millionaires, billionaire-types going, 'Oh, we'll just have to drink it.' "

bcrosariol@globeandmail.com