Corked or Cooked or Just Plain Bad?

[Stealthman]

Hi, it's great to be on this board, I've been reading it for almost a year now and have enjoyed it tremendously. I was wondering if someone could go into a little more detail as to what one is looking for when describing corked wine. My friends and I usually drink from 40 to 60 bottles of wine a month at home from BV Coastal to Lokoya and over the past couple years have run into more than our share of 'funny' bottles. Unfortunately this occurance seems to be more prevalent in expensive wines than cheap ones. Our first bottle of '97 Caymus SS had purple cork syndrome, inside, alongside, outside, as if it were dropped in wine before seated, but it did not leak. The wine was dead, virtually no fruit left, though did not taste foul, somewhat like a bottle of '85 Clos du Bois AV right now ('cept not musty!) . In the last year we have opened a '94 BV George same thing, though I would guess that this wine was cooked as I imagine that a corked wine over this amount of time would just plain taste bad like a bottle of '93 Berringer Reserve we would have poured down the sink had it not been for the good retailer I bought it from who was more than willing to refund. As a side note I have good storage conditions in a celler I built and I buy both from wineries and the entire retail gamut. I try to buy no wine from retailers (for cellering) from the first big heat to when I can tell inventories have turned from summer. Any help?