Fungus developing inside a broken bottle of Quevedo LBV 2003

Anyone has any idea of what is this on the photo? This is one of the most interesting things I learnt in the last weeks. I’ll explain where this comes from. We were preparing two of the four remaining pallets of LBV 2003 to send to Denmark when we found a purple stain on the side of one of the pallets, reaching some half a dozen of cases. I thought that it was a bottle that broke some time ago and spilled Port over the cases underneath.

We moved all the clean cases to another pallet and finally we found the case responsible for all this extra work. In the case there were 5 bottles in perfect conditions and one broken bottle, as expected. But surprisingly, the bottle was not broken in the bottom but by the shoulder. So the Port that was above the breaking ring spilled but the rest remained there and in contact with oxygen, a ball of fungus started developing the way you see it on the photo.

Broken bottles also teach us some lessons!

Oscar