How to pop a tiny champagne cork

The cork is normal. Over time, some of the pigment chemicals will embed themselves in the surface of the cork, starting by the edges. To my eye, the resulting zone has a bluish brown color. For a full red, the cork will turn a brown-purple, and eventually black. All of this should have no relationship to whether the wine is still good.

Some things to look for that will signal a bad bottle:

• A change in color of the wine (e.g., pale yellow turning deep gold)
• Indications that air entered the bottle or wine leaked out
• The smell or taste of wet cardboard in the wine
• An ammonia-like smell from the wine
• A vinegar taste

Hopefully none of these applied to your wine.

There are a couple of reasons why a wine would be slightly fizzy:

1. Maltreatment: wine which has been stored in a hot place will often be slight fizzy, as well as having a "sour cider" taste. This wine is ruined, throw it out.
2. Varietal: in addition to Champaigne/Prosecco/Cava,several other wine varietals are deliberately slightly fizzy, such as Lambrusco and some Vino Verde. They may not be labeled as fizzy because it's assumed you'd know from the varietal.

I'm going to have to contradict BaffledCook here: by the time a regular non-sweet wine is in the bottle, it should not have residual sugar or fizzyness, even if it's too young to drink. For standard wines, all sugar is converted in primary fermentation, and certainly none would make it through barrel-aging. So if you get a chardonnay or pinot grigio or merlot, and it's slightly fizzy, it's ruined and you should take it back to the market and exchange it.

EDIT: see discussion in comments.

SECOND EDIT: I went out and bought a 2011 white wine, and darned if BaffledCook isn't right. Very young, but otherwise good, wines can have a slight effervesence. So combine his answer and mine for 3 reasons why a wine would be slightly fizzy. Mind you, you shouldn't be drinking 2011 wines yet ... store them for a year ... but if you do, there it is.