2014 Barolo Fontana Fredda bottler

The bottle looked great; its label was unmistakable. Nebbiolo was grape varietal. Then the tasting evolved into something else!

When uncorking, I noticed the winemaker used an authentic cork, which had some seepage, leaching mid-way up. The pour was good, very dark red with legs clinging around the glass. Then the Nose. Yuk! It smelled like skunk. Somehow there was corkage, a ruined & undrinkable bottle of good Italian wine.

We can’t rate this particular bottle of ’14 Barolo due to corkage. We can state it was purchased at a quality wine shop, noting that even the in best of shops awful things can happen to their wine.

Wines hate too much light, too much motion as well as too much heat. What conditions caused this red wine to turn bad? We can only speculate that it was one of three things:

• A defective cork. Plastic corks are unreliable; composition corks over the short haul, but sometimes a real cork is faulty.

• The temperature. Maybe something happened during shipment, exposed to too hot or too cold. Maybe, the bottle stood upright in a sunny spot on a shelf?

What I know is the wine is lost; it’s dumped down the drain, Dang it!

Of course Shakespeare wrote poetry about wine,

“With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.

And let my liver rather heat with wine, than my heart cool with mortifying groans.”