No Wine Before Its Time

April 23rd, 2024

A lot of people who shop here are in the habit of collecting wine for near term, and long term consumption. One of those good people is Marc, who asked me some time back how to know when a wine is ready to drink. And since I recently wrote a column extolling the virtues of aging your own wine, this seems like a perfectly sensible follow up.

The short answer to this question is that I don’t know. But you didn’t come here for the short answer, you came for the long meandering one full of generalities and uncertainty. It’s what I’m known for.

In theory, a wine’s lifespan once bottled at times can be viewed as something of a bell curve. The wine starts its life, it gets better, it peaks, and then it begins its decline in quality. Although some wines start as good as they’re going to get, and then just decline in quality, while at other times some wines just shouldn’t have been made at all.

Unfortunately, this isn’t really something that you can know just by tasting a wine. As best I can tell, there aren’t objective metrics that you can plug into an app and then find out the ideal window of drinking time. There is however A LOT of subjective recorded experiences with aged wines that you can find online and, get this, in print. Major wine publications will claim that the drinking window for a hypothetical Wine X is between, let’s say, 2035 and 2040, but it’s unclear that that will be the peak window for your bottle of wine. It’s an estimate based on the track record of the style of wine, the results of the vintage, and performance history of the winery.

What you can know by tasting enough wine, is that eventually you reach a point where you can taste a young wine and simply have a sense that it has potential for long term aging. This is a combination of things that’s hard to articulate, and tougher to prove without considerable patience. What I look for is complexity, balance, and structure. All of which I’ve talked about at some point in these weekly columns. Though even when you think you have a handle on things, old wines show more bottle variation than young wines.

At a recent gathering of wine enthusiasts, we opened a 2009 Château Thivin Côte de Brouilly and it wasn’t showing well. It had an aroma that manifests to me as something akin to celery seed or bouillon cube, which I think can be pretty interesting in aged Italian reds or Bordeaux, but not so much in aged Gamay, and usually a sign that the wine doesn’t have much life left in it. We thought it possible that with a little bit of exposure to oxygen, this quality might change into something more positive, but it didn’t really.

Luckily we had a second bottle of the same wine, same vintage, same storage, same source and, you may have guessed it, the experience was like night and day. The second bottle retained its Burgundian red fruits reminiscent of the wine in its youth, still had complexity, and indications that it could keep aging without rapid ill effect. So what’s the deal?

The first wine didn’t bode well for the future of aging the wine, the second did. As a case of wine ages, variation between bottles really does start to become more evident. This could be due to storage, how the wine was handled at bottling, how it was packed for transit, or a number of other qualities that may never be made obvious to us.

Unfortunately, sometimes the best way to figure out a wine’s peak drinking window is to open the wine, in which case you’re proven right or wrong. But if you open the only bottle and it tastes like it can age longer to its benefit, then you’ve lost your shot at its possible peak. This is why I advocate for buying more than one bottle of a particular, especially with the example of the Cote de Brouilly mentioned above in mind.

I really do believe that there are benefits to aging wine, but there’s also merit in the philosophy of “if it tastes good now, why wait?” How’s that for meandering generality?

-Joe Buchter, Import Wine Buyer

Need to reach me for all things wine? Email me at [email protected]!