The ceremonies took place in a lavish meeting complex at the Taipei Meridien Hotel, with wine to drink, not Grange of course but pkenty of it, and all you can eat sushi and hors d’oevres. After a few minutes in the outer chamber we were admitted to the recorking room.

Anyone with a bottle of Penfolds more than 15 years old could come to have their wine evaluated. But Peter Gago and his team only perform the recorking if the level in the bottle had dropped below a carefully measured level, and if it has dropped too far they also reject the wine without opening it.

But if the team judges your bottle ready and worthy of preserving, they carefully remove the cork, sometimes using two teflon-coated corkscrews. The moment the cork is out they fiĺl the neck of the bottle with inert gas (to minimize exposure to oxygen) and draw out a tasting sample of 10cl. Peter Gago then tastes the wine and decides whether not to proceed with recorking. If the wine us not healthy for its vintage, it still gets another cork, but no top-up, no certificate, and no new capsule.

If the wine is clean the process continues. A Penfolds winemaker carefully tops up the bottle with 21cl of current vintage of the same label. — Grange for Grange, Bin 389 for Bin 389, etc. Once again the neck is filled with inert gas, and then they insert a brand new cork and crimp on a new capsule. The wine is now as tight and safe as the day it was first bottled. Then comes the certificste of authenticity, signed by Peter Gago himself and last the tissue wrapping and your done.

Perhaps simply because he knew my name and I was standing right in front, Peter Gago chose me to receive the bottle of Bin 389 that he recorked for our demonstration.

After it was over we sat in the waiting are for a few minutes with our friend Momo who had brought two bottles of ’97 Grange. We learned later that Peter Gago had judged Momo’s Grange in good condition and had not recorked it. Next time.