Happy Australia Day!
To celebrate the day, we’re going to take a look at a recently acquired bottle. A few weekends ago, AWG acquired four aged bottles of wine at an auction. This article covers the uncorking of a 1970 Hardy’s “Nottage Hill” Claret.
The bottle has obviously seen better days; the cork was in very poor condition, labels marred and torn. The ullage was the lowest of the four bottles, which is never a good sign. Given the condition, we used this bottle as experience in handling an old bottle.
The uncorking was problematic, the cork had actually shrunk and hardened and therefore couldn’t be extracted via corkscrew. In the end we just had to push it into the bottle and pour the wine out into the decanter.
Using a strainer, most of the built up sediment was separated from the wine. However, there was far more to be done. Employing the use of an aeration device (pictured) the wine was poured back into the bottle (once it had been washed/cleaned).
Here, you can see the amount (and fineness) of sediment which made it through the strainer.
Now, once the wine was safely back in the bottle (a process known as “double decanting”), we can use the aeration device to continue to filter the wine as we the wine back into the original decanter.
Finally, we arrive at the final glass – the tasting notes are as follows:
This wine clearly had been exposed to air and the result was not great. A heavy lean towards vinegar, unfortunately ruined what would have been an outstanding wine. Although the acidity was way off the charts, there were hints of the foundation of the wine still in evidence.
There was a real theme of oak, blackcurrant and sultanas but, of course, this has been overpowered by the exposure to air. Shame.
We also opened the 1966 bottle from McLaren Vale.
This bottle, older than the Hardy’s, still had the cork more or less intact – to a degree. It was very close, but somehow(!) the cork managed to keep a seal intact, despite massive degradation to the cork itself.
The extraction was very difficult. It separated into three separate sections during the extraction, but in the end was extracted without allowing the cork into the bottle.
Following the same process described above, the wine was successfully decanted. We left the decanter to air overnight, and began tasting the following day. The wine was far from bad; perhaps a few years beyond its prime, but still exceptionally drinkable.
The bouquet was sticky, pungent and aromatic, the colour was a deep red, and the body quite viscous. Only one word could really capture the flavour of the wine: plums. The wine simply tasted like an amazing and complex array of flavours, but was dominated by the taste of plums and figs.
It took a few days to finish off the entire bottle, and was worth every penny spent.
