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Discovered this in Tom Maresca's blog of March 3, 2010: http://ubriaco.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/and-into-the-closet/

Most problems with stored wines arise from corks. Corking probably destroys more wines than bad storage ever did. The culprit is a fungus in the cork that grows with age and permeates the wine, so a young wine may be slightly corked and an older wine completely ruined, smelling and tasting of damp cardboard. Unfortunately, there is no way of detecting this problem until you open the bottle, when it usually makes itself painfully apparent.

The only remedy – and it's not perfect – is the plastic-wrap treatment.

Pour all the wine into a bowl, take a large sheet of plastic wrap, dunk it in the bowl, slosh it around a bit, and leave it there for 5 or 10 minutes. (The molecule that infects the wine is chemically akin to the polyethylene in the wrap, and it bonds to the plastic.) Then squeeze the wine out of the wrap, discard the wrap, and transfer the wine into a pourable container.  This procedure can make many apparently ruined wines drinkable, if not all that they would have been, so you get at least some small reward for your patience.  

On the other hand, when the cork is sound and the wine mature, the reward your patience reaps is enormous, and unmatchable any other way.