Dusty old bottles of wine

[zxcvbob]

Any wine connoisseurs here?  I have 4 bottles of red wine that I didn't exactly forget about, but I didn't realize how long they'd been stored.  Would any of these actually be improved by age, or are they way past their prime?  They have been stored on their sides at room temperature.  The air space in the necks look ok (not excessive)

1) Carmen Vineyards (Chile) 1993 Merlot, 12.5% ABV
2) Montevina (California) 1994 Brioso Zinfandel, 12% ABV
3) Georges Dubeuf (France) 1998 "Milenage" (Cabernet Sauvignon 60%, Merlot 30%, Syrah 10%), 12.3% ABV
4) Buffalo Ridge (not sure where this one's from) 1999 Syrah, 13.7% ABV

I think these are all grape varieties that can take some age, but 20 years is a long time for most nonfortified wines...

[brimic]

You don't know until you try them.
As long as they were stored out of sunlight and not too warm, they should be fine.

[Gewehr98]

Reds do well with aging.

Whites, not so much.

Conditions of storage also dictate how well they do over time.

[AmbulanceDriver]

Well,  you've either got good wine,  bad wine, or vinegar...  As has been said,  you won't know until you open it... Just be careful, the cork is likely to crumble some.  Might not hurt to decant through a strainer.

[Devonai]

I recently attended my best friend's wedding in wine country in Moravia.  The father of the bride gave each member of the wedding party a bottle of his own white, as well as a bottle of home-made slivovice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slivovice.

Due to a remarkably bad language barrier between myself and the Delta agent at Prague International Airport, I was told the unlabeled bottles could not accompany back to the US.  Even though the agent was dead wrong, there was no way I was going to get into an argument with her with the local cops standing nearby with their nifty CZ-75s at their sides.  Unfortunately I was traveling home alone, so none of my Czech-speaking friends were there to help me.  Delta helpfully told me to either dump them out in the bathroom or mail them to myself.  So for $26.50, I mailed the bottles across the Atlantic to my home address.

Five weeks later, the box arrived.  The slivovice was toast.  The white, while probably not poisonous, had become undrinkable.  Oh, well, I got a pretty green bottle at least.

[Azrael256]

It wasn't drinkable to begin with.  That stuff will rot your insides.  I had a Bulgarian girl try to poison me with it. 

[Gewehr98]

Plum brandy (aka Slivovitz) done properly is a wonderful thing. 

Homemade hooch can be downright scary, especially when distilled without making careful cuts between foreshots, heads, hearts, and tails.

Stone fruit wines really need to have the foreshots discarded during distillation due to the methanol produced in fermentation.

Then there's the aging process in wooden casks afterwards. 

[Devonai]

Oops, I meant that the slivovice bottle was in a million little shards.  It probably would have been fine if not for old man Newton.

[Tuco]

Whatareya sitting there yapping about.

Drink that *expletive deleted*it and report back, ya reprobate.