Stern test for cellar

Tears and tantrums were not far away at an afternoon tasting in Auckland last month, as some unlucky collectors' treasures were declared unfit for consumption. Yes, it was the travelling road show that is the Penfolds Recorking Clinic, led by the winery's chief winemaker Peter Gago. It was the second time the clinic has been held in Auckland.

In the same way that Rolls-Royce will send their mechanics anywhere in the world to fix a problem in situ, Penfolds will fix people's ill-cared for bottles - provided they are worth fixing.

In the flash of an eye, a bottle worth $1500 or more can lose its value. When Gago and his team open and taste a bottle of wine - or case - that is past it, they will not top it up after tasting (as they do with good wines), or recork and certify them.

For those whose wines have been cellared well and are in good condition, the prognosis is better. The wines get a little top-up (which constitutes only about 2 per cent of the final wine), then they get sealed with a new cork and a certification sticker signed by Gago and others from Penfolds.

Though Penfolds Wines is hardly the Rolls-Royce of the wine world, its top wine, Grange, can lay claim to being revered as much as the famous car brand. Most of the wines brought along to the free recorking clinics are either Grange or among the top tiers of the multi-layered Penfolds range. So there is much gnashing of teeth when the wines are not in good nick.

The official line is that the clinics are there to protect and rejuvenate older Penfolds wines that have unacceptable ullage levels; aka oxidisation or leakage via a seeping cork. The ulterior motive is to take bad wine bearing the Penfolds labels off the market.

The biggest challenge lies in making collectors understand that some of the highly collectable Penfolds wines from the 1950s are merely curios now, says Andrew Caillard, Master of Wine and director of Langton's Wine Auctions & Exchange in Australia.

The value of some wines relates to their historical context in the Australian wine industry. Many of them are completely over the hill as a drink; not worthy of recorking, let alone certifying.

For every bottle of old wine that Gago does award a pass mark to, he loses a bottle of new wine that he uses to top up the old wines with.

In this manner, the clinics are delivering value to well-cellared wines. But there is no such thing as a free lunch, tasting or top-up clinic because Gago also gets to remove dodgy wines not only from people's cellars but also from the secondary wine market - on which Caillard actively auctions large quantities of Penfolds wines each year.