Beauty before age, perhaps before dinner

To age, or not to age, that is the question.

Not every wine is made to age. Keep in mind a few statistics… average time from purchase to consumption for the majority of wine is about an hour and a half.  And 90% of all wines should be drunk within a couple of years of being released; sooner for some wines that are tank fermented and aged, like many Sauvignon Blancs. 

Winemakers realize this and make most wines in a ready-to-drink, approachable style.  But all too often we buy wines at the grocery or big box store intending to salt it away with the expectation of turning a $7.99 bottle of “Cranky Pete’s Red” into a $50 bottle of “Rico Sauvé Claret”.  

In general, white wine is more fragile when aging than red, with fortified wines like Port and Madeira being much less susceptible to senility mainly due to a much higher alcohol content. If the objective is to lay away a bottle, look for a full-bodied white or red that is usually barrel fermented and always barrel aged. While price is not always an indicator of quality, the more expensive wines normally do receive the “elevage”, or upbringing, that allows them to age and improve. 

Drinking aged wines has not always been desirable. In the old days, new, fresh wine was what drinkers wanted and older wines tended to turn to vinegar either due to poor winemaking, dirty storage, or exposure to air. Credit the Romans with the realization that wine properly sealed in a container, called an “amphora,” could actually improve with age. 

But before we give Roman wine aficionados too much, according to the laws of Romulus, only free men over 35 were allowed to drink: wine and women were prohibited. Husbands were entitled to kill their wives for even attempting to drink, and it’s said the custom of husbands greeting their wives with a kiss on their return home was to insure they had not been imbibing! It was not until the Eighteenth Century, most notably in the Bordeaux region France, that large-scale production of wine started being made deliberately to cellar. 

So, when to drink?  I give two pieces of advice to those seeking the right time to drink their wines.  One is, if you like the way it tastes now, drink it. The other is, while it’s ideal to drink a wine at its prime, it’s always better to drink a wine a little too young than a little too old. You can always decant a too young wine, giving it lots of sloshing and splashing to let it breathe and open up, but it’s impossible to resurrect one too old from the dead.  As the saying goes, “drink no wine before its time.” 

OK — it’s time!