Wine Vocab of the Week: Library Release

August 21st, 2024

Last week in our newsletter I advertised a 2010 Valpolicella (that quickly sold out) as a “Library Release,” and sometimes it doesn’t occur to me which of our regular wine business jargon is more opaque than not. Long time reader Paul, emailed and asked me to clarify what the term “library release” meant.

If you’ve ever wondered why wines from new wineries are often way more expensive than wines from old wineries it is a matter of finances. If you’re part of a family that has a 10th generation winemaking estate, you’ve had a long time to build up savings and pay down debts. A fresh young winery that opened last year is still, in addition to day-to-day costs, paying all sorts of startup costs, bank loans, payments to investors, building up savings for the lean times, etc. An old winery also has the good fortune of building up monetary reserves, but they also have the time to build up vinous reserves.

If you take note of the photo above, what you’ll see is the cellar at the winery of Emidio Pepe in Italy’s Abruzzo where a vast store of unlabeled bottles are organized by vintage of the harvest. Some wineries do this as a matter of philosophy, choosing to release their wines after they believe that they’ve become “ready to drink.” Most wineries make their wine and then hold onto it for one to three years before release, relying on someone else to determine when it’s time for the bottle to be opened. Sure, they’re ready to drink as soon as they’re liquid, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be tasting their best.

This is a common practice with Spanish wineries, especially those located in Rioja. For example the current release on Faustino’s Gran Reserva Rioja is a 2011 on the shelf at $40 a bottle, while their 2004 can be had for a hundred bucks a bottle. These aren’t cheap wines, but by contrast of what some wine goes for, they’re downright values. I was looking at a restaurant wine list recently, and an unnamed bottle of California Pinot Noir that I sell for $12 was on the restaurant’s list for $45. Even leaving restaurant pricing out of the equation, a twenty year old bottle of Napa Cab, Burgundy, or Bordeaux would far exceed the relatively modest price that the 2004 Faustino is asking for.

Aside from a philosophic or gustatory decision to hold on to wine, there is certainly a financial reason to do so. You would think that a winery’s motivation would be to move product fast for cash flow, but grapes are of course subject to the whims of nature and dearth or glut that each vintage brings. Some wineries will hold back a percentage of production in the event that they have a year with a particularly low yield of grapes, that they will have SOMETHING to sell. It isn’t unheard of for some wine regions to have crop loss as high as 100% when weather conditions are truly awful.

Whatever the decision to hold back the wine, there is an inherent reason as to why you shouldn’t sleep on library releases of your favorite kinds of wine even if they aren’t inexpensive. If the enemies of wine are light, heat, and vibration, then what better place than the near perfect conditions of the winery itself to store the bottles. A good winery’s cellar is designed with optimal storage conditions and if the bottles never leave the basement, no vibration to jostle those tender sleeping babies.

Personally, the library releases that I always keep an eye out for are those of Spanish reds and German Riesling, both categories that rarely disappoint with age. Whatever your preferred bunch of grapes is, keep an eye out for those age-ed bottles where wine is sold.

-Joe Buchter, Import Wine Buyer

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