Most of the wine we drink is aged about as long as it takes to get it home from the store.
That’s not necessarily bad. Lots of wine is simple, every night wine meant to be drunk soon after it’s been released. But really good wines—many of them anyway—benefit from aging for a few years to a decade or more.
So what happens as a wine ages? And how do you know how long to age any given wine?
As a wine presenter and wine book author, I’m asked these two questions all the time. Here’s what I say:
First, it’s fascinating to know that for most of history, young wine cost a lot more than old wine. Young wine—fresh and vivid—was delicious. But old wine, kept in unclean barrels for years, was microbial, musty, oxidized, sour, and dependably on its way to becoming vinegar.
It wasn’t until wine began to be regularly put into cylindrical and stoppered glass bottles sometime in the 18th century that wine drinkers realized that wine could actually be preserved. Indeed, certain wines got surprisingly better with time. This was true of both white and red wines, although fine reds in particular often underwent an almost magical conversion. And because they did, aging great wine became a common practice.
Most very good to great red wines start out “tight” –that is, their flavors are not very expressive. But with time, such wines slowly metamorphose until they become supple and complex. Aided by tiny amounts of oxygen that seep through the cork, the molecules in a great wine interact, evolve, and coalesce in ways that remain mysterious and unpredictable. While no one can chart the path a great wine might take, or the rate at which it will take the journey, we know from empirical evidence that a great wine will indeed get even better with time.
It’s not just that the wine’s aromas and flavors will be more vivid; whole new unanticipated aromas and flavors will emerge. This is the essential “head trip” of a great wine—and why a great old wine costs a lot of money. No other entity in the world undergoes so extraordinary a transformation toward the sublime.
In order to be aged for years and improve with time, a wine must possess one of three things: a lot of tannin, a lot of acid, or a lot of natural sugar. These are the three great “natural preservatives” that can help sustain a wine more than, say, five years or so. For example, consider a typical collector’s cellar. Chances are it’s filled with red Bordeaux and/or Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. Both of these red wines contain significant amounts of tannin, allowing the wines to be laid down for a long time.
How long exactly? I wish I could say. But wine is not a cake. It’s not “done” at some prescribed moment in time. Every great wine is an evolving, living entity that changes according to its own rhythms. This should not be disillusioning. In fact, it is just the opposite. The unpredictability of wine makes it all the more compelling. Never truly knowing what to expect is part of the attraction; it is why wine appeals to the intellect in a way that, say, vodka does not. Best of all, the incontrovertibly inexact nature of readiness is a good reason to buy multiple bottles of the same wine, then open them at different ages to discover how the wine reveals itself.
My friend, the late Warren Winiarski, the founder of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in the Napa Valley, once said to me, “Age gives wine a sense of beauty and satisfaction that it could never have had when it was young. In our minds, we intuit beauty and satisfaction as a feeling of completeness. Because so much of life is incomplete, an old wine is remarkable and moving.”
As one of today’s powerful female speakers in the wine world, I often emphasize that when you finally open that special bottle you’ve been hanging onto for the past ten years, be prepared to be moved. It will be worth the wait.
