Fill level is the first thing to look at
The fill level — where the wine sits in the bottle — is the single best clue to how a bottle has been kept. Wine escapes past a tired cork and air takes its place, so a low fill on a young wine means something went wrong, while the same level on a 1970 Bordeaux is entirely normal.
- Into neck / base neck
- Excellent at any age.
- Top shoulder
- Normal for wines of fifteen years and more.
- Upper shoulder
- Common at twenty years and more.
- High to mid shoulder
- Acceptable with age, but worth asking about on anything young.
- Mid shoulder
- Not unusual at thirty to forty years. Expect variability.
- Low shoulder and below
- A gamble. Below the shoulder and into the body is not recommended for drinking.
Those bands are named for Bordeaux-shaped bottles, which have a shoulder to measure against. Burgundy and German bottles slope continuously, so there is nothing to name — the trade records a distance from the base of the cork instead, in millimetres, and so do we.
Label, capsule and the rest
Label and capsule are graded separately, because they tell you different things. A stained, bin-soiled label usually means a damp cellar, which is good for corks. A corroded or pushed-up capsule can mean seepage, which is not.
- Pristine
- As it left the château.
- Excellent
- Trivial marks, nothing that affects the bottle.
- Good
- Honest signs of age and storage.
- Minor damage
- Nicks, tears or staining worth seeing in the photographs.
- Major damage
- Significant — read the seller's notes before bidding.
- Missing
- Not there at all.
“Not assessed” means not assessed
Where a seller has not graded something, the listing says so instead of quietly showing the best case. An unassessed fill level is not a good fill level — it is an unanswered question, and on an expensive lot it is one worth asking the seller before you bid.
Sellers are rated on condition accuracy, and the figure is shown next to how much they actually declared. Grading nothing is not a way to keep a clean record.