T wrote:

> I have some bottles of those airplane size containers of Alcohol.

How big are these airplanes? A Cessna is considerably less than a
C-130, for instance.

> They are at least 10 years old.
>
> Are they still drinkable? Or does it spoil?
> I have such things like, gin, vodka, cognac, etc.
>
> Does it matter if I opened them or not?
> Does it spoil once opened? (and left open)

I'm too lazy to paraphrase most of this, so I'll post the link to my site:

http://www.guntheranderson.com/liqueurs/storage.htm

The shortt answer is, sufficiently strong alcohol doesn't spoil in any
sense that you mean. Alcohol is a disinfectant, and happily kills any
microorganisms that try to set up housekeeping. So sufficiently strong
alcohol does not rot. However, it certainly goes stale. Air exposure
of any sort will kill the flavor of alcohol. Smaller bottles are more
susceptible to oxidation, because there's simply less liquid to absorb
the oxygen. However, I've had "nip" bottles of vodka upwards of a few
years old that had shown no particular problems.

So the answer is, they're definitely drinkable, and they will not harm
you any more than fresh alcohol will. However, they may no longer taste
like they originally did. Nips are made for quick consumption, not
storage. Distilled liquors in general aren't intended for storage,
since they do not benefit fro mit, unlike wine.

> I also have some wine that I bought back in 1990.
> Does wine expire?

Some wine gets much better with time. Some wine gets much, much worse.
Any wine with a cork problem has undoubtedly gotten worse. I don't
drink wine much, but I had a dozen bottles which had been stored poorly
that I decided to consume or toss. A good half of them were undrinkably
bad (they hadn't rotted, but the oxidation made them taste nasty)
because of leaks around the cork. The rest were reasonable, but none of
them were really good wine in the first place. So none of them were
exceptionally good.

So, like the liquors abve, the wine won't kill you, but might taste
nasty. Pop it open, give it a shot, and don't feel obligated to drink
it if it's not good. Life's too short to consume bad-tasting things
just because you paid for them.

Gunther Anderson