Cork Variability
TroubleShooting
Emily Robinson — San Jose, California asks,
I hope it’s OK if I take a question a bit out of the home winemaking realm, but maybe your readers will find this of interest. We use a hand-corker to cork our homemade wine, but when we bought a mixed case of wine for a party from our usual local wine shop and brought them home, we noticed that a couple of the bottles seemed to have the cork pushed up a few millimeters above the lip of the glass bottle. The bottles in question were two totally separate wines.
We know from our own home winemaking experience that sometimes the plunger on our hand corker can make the depth to which the cork is pushed vary a little from bottle to bottle. However, in commercial wines, does this mean anything? Is there anything wrong with the wine? Thanks for any of your wiz-dom on the topic!