A buyer's guide to vintage wine

A mould-streaked, peeling label is usually good news. A flawless one on a forty-year-old bottle is a reason to worry. This is the first thing that separates seasoned buyers of mature wine from everyone else: they know that the part of a bottle most people admire, the label, says almost nothing about what is inside, while the parts most people ignore say almost everything.

Buying old wine is an act of faith. The bottle cannot be tasted before it is paid for, and a wine that spent thirty years in a cool cellar can sit beside an identical bottle that spent its summers in a warm flat, the two indistinguishable until the cork comes out. By then the money has changed hands. What separates them is not the château's reputation or the vintage's score but how each bottle was kept, and heat is the enemy that does the most damage.

Five elements ofs a bottle, read together, reveal whether it has been looked after or quietly cooked.

01The fill level

The gap between the cork and the surface of the wine is called ullage, and a little of it is normal: over the decades a small amount of wine escapes through the cork and evaporates, so an old bottle sits lower than a young one. The mistake most buyers make is to judge the fill in absolute terms. A level that would be alarming in a ten-year-old wine is unremarkable in one of fifty. The measure also depends on the bottle. Bordeaux, with its square shoulders, is graded by where the wine sits on them, from “into neck” down through top, upper, mid and low shoulder. Burgundy and other sloped bottles, having no shoulder to mark, are measured in centimetres of ullage below the cork. A 1961 at top shoulder is healthy; a 2015 at mid shoulder is not. A low fill does not condemn a wine outright, but it raises the odds of oxidation, which is why it is read alongside the cork and capsule rather than on its own.

Of the five checks, fill level is the one you can practise by eye. Drag the wine line down the bottle below to see how each named level reads — and why a gap that would condemn a young wine is perfectly normal on an old one.

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02The label

Appearances mislead. Mould, damp staining and the scuffs of decades in a cellar bin are signs that a bottle was kept cold and humid, which is exactly the condition wine wants. The flaw that should give a buyer pause is seepage: dried wine running down from beneath the capsule, evidence that the bottle once grew hot, the wine expanded, and it forced its way past the cork. A spotless label on an old bottle, far from reassuring, can mean the bottle was relabelled, stored in unusual conditions, or is not what it claims to be. A label is worth reading for what it says about the cellar, not for how it looks on a shelf.

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03The cork

Usually hidden under the capsule, the cork is the clearest single indicator of heat damage when it can be seen, and the direction it has travelled tells the story. A cork pushed proud of the rim, or a capsule bulging upward, means the wine was heated and expanded against it. A cork sunk down into the neck points instead to a failing seal. Some softening is expected in very old bottles, which is why prestigious wines are occasionally recorked at the château or domaine. That is legitimate, provided it is disclosed, and it makes a bottle's documented history matter more rather than less.

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04The capsule

The foil over the cork is partly cosmetic, but it sits directly above the part of the bottle that fails first. Corrosion, or a capsule stuck fast to the cork, may be nothing worse than cellar humidity, or it may conceal seepage, which is why careful sellers cut or lift it to inspect the cork on expensive bottles. On valuable wines, a capsule that appears to have been removed and put back is a warning, because that is one of the ways a refilled or counterfeit bottle is disguised. The absence of any condition note on a costly old bottle is itself a kind of answer.

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05The provenance

Everything above can be seen. Provenance cannot: it is the record of where a bottle has spent the past twenty, forty or sixty years, and it is the single biggest factor in whether the wine survived. A bottle held at a steady 12-14°C in the dark will outlast an identical one that baked through a run of summers. Documented provenance, a named cellar with a purchase history, ideally straight from the producer, commands a premium for good reason. Anonymous bottles are not necessarily bad, but they are bought on trust. And an original wooden case is a comforting sign rather than proof: a wine can spend twenty years in a beautiful case in a hot garage.

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Where to buy

Three channels dominate the trade in old wine, and each strikes a different bargain between selection, price and trust. Auctions hold the deepest stock of rare and aged bottles, but offer the least control. A buyer's premium is added to the hammer price, the wine usually cannot be examined in person, and provenance ranges from a complete cellar history to nothing at all. The condition notes, and the reputation of the house writing them, are what matter. Specialist merchants, including online sellers, do the sourcing and inspection in advance; the buyer gives up the chance to judge a bottle in person in return for the work of someone who has already judged it, and a good merchant lists the fill level and the faults instead of hiding them. Traditional wine shops suit those who value a relationship with a knowledgeable seller, though few carry genuinely old vintages, and provenance on the ones they do is often thin.

One warning sign crosses all three channels. A price well below the going rate is seldom a bargain. A minute on a site such as Wine-Searcher establishes what a wine usually fetches, and a bottle priced far beneath that is almost always signalling a problem with its fill, its provenance or its authenticity.

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How Amsterdam Vintage Wine buys and stores its wine

Amsterdam Vintage Wine sources from private European cellars and from auction houses, and runs the same five tests before any bottle is listed. Those with a fill wrong for their age, signs of seepage, or a history that does not hold together are turned away. What passes is kept cool, dark and at stable humidity, so that it goes on ageing slowly rather than cooking. Every listing states what was found: the fill level, the condition, and the provenance where it is known, including the cases where it is not. A bottle described plainly as sitting at mid shoulder serves a buyer better than one shot from a flattering angle, and over time that is the only approach that holds.

For the wider picture on where fine wine prices stand, see the state of fine wine. For anyone who simply wants to buy one good old bottle and drink it well, the five checks above are most of the education required.

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This guide follows the fill-level conventions used by the major auction houses: shoulder position for Bordeaux, centimetres of ullage for Burgundy and other sloped bottles. The levels indicate risk rather than certainty, and are best read alongside the cork, capsule, label and provenance.

Amsterdam Vintage Wine sources vintage wines from private cellars and auction houses across Europe. Browse our collection at amsterdamvintagewine.com.