It's a tense moment, played out in reality 1,000 times a day and on television a dozen times a night. The doctor in the white coat bends over the examination table. The patient is inert, silent, apparently anesthetized.
Taking a knife, the doctor cuts the capsule with a deft stroke and peels it off. His soft voice is muted, but it cuts through the tension like the knife in his hand. "The ullage looks pretty good," he says quietly to his assistant, "but I can see some seepage."
He stands up, his expression grim. "We're going to have to remove it."
Taking a corkscrew from the tray of instruments, he removes the cork from the bottle, and pours a sample of wine into a glass. Needing no prompting, the assistant pumps gas into the bottle to protect the remaining wine from the air. The procedure is professional and practised, the teamwork seamless.
The patient — a bottle of Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz 1982 — has been stabilized.
A doctor drinking on the job? No, the white-coated doctor is Penfolds' chief winemaker Peter Gago, and the operating room is the Penfolds Red Wine Re-Corking Clinic. The clinic visited Toronto last October as part of a North American tour that also included San Francisco and New York.
The purpose of the clinic (not-for-profit, and a short wait-time, by the way) is to provide after-sales service to people who buy Penfolds wines. Penfolds, one of Australia's best-known wine producers, makes Grange, which is Australia's icon wine, and a big range of other reds and whites.
The original Dr. Penfold, a physician who made wine and prescribed it as a tonic for his undernourished patients in 19th-century Australia, would surely approve.
The clinic gives owners of Penfolds red wines the opportunity to have their wines evaluated by Mr. Gago, winemaker and Penfolds ambassador extraordinaire. He first checks the ullage, the gap between the wine and the cork. If the level of the wine is low, some wine has leaked or evaporated and been replaced by air. He also examines the cork through the bottle to assess how far the wine has seeped into it.
If he thinks it's necessary, he removes the original cork and tastes the wine to make sure it's still in good condition. The owner can taste it, too. If the wine is still good, Mr. Gago tops it up and puts a new Penfolds-branded cork in the bottle.
After that, a new capsule (in distinctive Penfolds red) is added. (Mr. Gago brought the recorking and capsule equipment with him from Australia.) Finally, a numbered and signed back-label is attached to the bottle to certify that the wine has been assessed and recorked.
The reason for all this is that corks last only so long. If you've ever pulled a cork and noticed that the wine has soaked part of the way through it, you'll realize that, given enough time, the cork will be totally sodden. Once that happens, and the wine begins to leak, air enters the bottle and oxidizes the wine. Replacing the cork before it's soaked right through prevents that from happening.
Wine is recorked systematically in many wineries where cellars hold wines that are 20, 30, 50 or more years old. But Penfolds is the only winery to provide the service to its customers. And they recork not only their high-end wines (there were more bottles of Grange at the Toronto clinic than I've ever seen in one place), they'll even recork a bottle of the affordable Koonunga Hill red (reviewed today), if necessary. In general, wines have to be at least 15 years old to qualify for recorking, however.
An hour after it went into the clinic, my bottle of Bin 389 was leaving, looking as chipper as a 23-year-old wine can. (Think of wine-years like dog-years.) Mr. Gago's prescription, though, was that I shouldn't wait too long before drinking it. Wine has a lifespan that can be cut short by a bad cork, but it can't be extended indefinitely.
Sometime soon I'll take my bottle out of the cellar for the last time. It's had a relaxed, full life (the ullage is high), and it will fulfil its destiny of giving me and someone else a great deal of pleasure.
Look for super-premium Penfolds wines in Vintages, but there's a selection of affordable Penfolds wines in the LCBO too. Four are reviewed today.