Capsule, cork, label, glass: reading a bottle.

Beyond the fill level, an old bottle carries four other pieces of evidence, and the useful skill is knowing which imperfections are reassuring. Most collectors instinctively want an old bottle to look new, which is exactly backwards.

The label

A label that has spent fifty years in a damp cellar will be stained, may be torn at the edges, and may carry mould. All of that is good. It means the bottle has lived in humidity, which is what keeps a cork supple, and it means nobody has tried to improve it.

What deserves a question is a label that is too clean, too bright, or too new for its claimed age; a label whose paper stock feels modern; or glue that has been renewed. Scuffing where the bottle has rubbed against its neighbours in a case is normal and tells you it was stored lying down among others.

The one genuinely bad sign is a stain running down from the capsule. That is seepage: wine has escaped past the cork, and where wine got out, air got in.

The capsule

The capsule is lead on older bottles, tin or plastic on newer ones, and it is the part most often interfered with, because getting at the cork means getting through it.

• Light corrosion and dulling on an old lead capsule is ordinary.
• A capsule that turns freely is normal on many old bottles and means nothing on its own.
• A capsule that looks newer than the label, or sits unevenly, or shows a crease where it has been re-crimped,

is the single most common sign of tampering.

• Estate recorking is usually recorded here: a stamp, a new capsule bearing the date, or a mark on the

cork itself. That is disclosure, not concealment, and it should appear in the description.

The cork

Rarely visible before purchase, and decisive after it. A cork branded with the estate name and the vintage, in a typeface consistent with the period, is strong evidence. A blank cork on a wine whose producer has always branded them is not.

Corks shrink and harden over decades, which is why old bottles need care in opening and why sommeliers reach for two-pronged pullers on anything over forty. A cork that pushed upward and left a wine stain on the capsule underside tells you the bottle got hot at some point in its life.

The glass

The least glamorous and the hardest to fake, because nobody keeps a stock of period glass.

Bottle profiles changed over the decades: shoulder angle, neck length, the depth of the punt, the colour of the glass, the presence and position of mould seams, and embossing at the base. A 1940s Bordeaux should be in 1940s-looking glass, heavier and less regular than modern production, and often slightly irregular in colour. Estate embossing on the shoulder or the base began at different dates at different châteaux.

None of this needs a specialist for the obvious cases. A very old wine in visibly modern, uniform, lightweight glass is finished as a conversation.

Two bottles that read differently

Not every wine follows Bordeaux conventions, and reading them by that standard produces false alarms.

Château Musar from the Bekaa carries bottle-to-bottle variation as a matter of house style, and its older vintages travelled through a civil war on their way from the vineyard to the cellar. Labels from those years are often rough. It is part of the record.

Rivesaltes from 1931 spent decades in glass demijohns and old wood before it ever saw a bottle, which is how the style is made. The vintage on the label is the harvest, not the bottling, and the level in the bottle tells you about the last few years rather than the last ninety.