What a fill level actually tells you
Ullage is the most useful number on any older bottle, and the most commonly fudged. Here is how to read it, and what we will not pretend it means.
Wine leaves a bottle slowly. Cork is a living material; over decades a little evaporates through it and a little seeps past it, and the level in the neck falls. Merchants call the gap ullage, and where the wine sits is the closest thing to an honest x-ray of how a bottle has lived.
Read it against age, never on its own
Into-neck on a 2015 tells you nothing at all — it should be there. Into-neck on a 1961 is remarkable, and usually means the bottle spent its whole life lying still somewhere cold. The same words mean different things sixty years apart, which is why a fill level quoted without a vintage is marketing rather than information.
Bordeaux is read against the shoulder
A Bordeaux bottle has a hard shoulder, which gives everyone a shared landmark: into neck, base of neck, very top shoulder, top shoulder, upper shoulder, mid shoulder, low shoulder. Most well-kept mature claret sits at top shoulder or better. Mid shoulder and below is where risk becomes real and price should fall accordingly.
Burgundy has no shoulder to read
Burgundy and Rhône bottles slope. There is no landmark, so the shoulder vocabulary is meaningless on them — which does not stop it being used. We measure those in centimetres from the bottom of the cork and publish the number, because a number cannot be rounded up in the retelling.
A fill level quoted without a vintage is marketing. A fill level quoted without a scale is decoration.
What it does not tell you
A perfect fill is not a guarantee the wine is sound, and a low fill is not proof it is dead. We have opened faultless bottles at mid shoulder and tired ones at base of neck. Fill is evidence about storage, read alongside the capsule, any sign of seepage, the label's condition and where the bottle actually came from. That is the whole point of keeping a file on each parcel rather than a single adjective.
Our full scale — fill, label, capsule, packaging and the four provenance tiers we use, including the one that says we do not know — is published on the condition page. If a merchant will not show you their scale, the scale is doing no work.