RT @drvino: In praise of mature wine [link to post]

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Bravo! Age is everything.. •RT• In praise of mature wine [link to post] @drvino *btw, 40 is still young..

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Also, as was mentioned above, aged bottles, which are that much more likely to be expensive, are also that much more susceptible to flaws: TCA and particularly heat damage. On the extraordinarily rare occasion that I shell out more than $40 for a bottle, I wince, as I fear what happened recently when I bought a bottle of Paolo Bea Montefalco Sagrantino 2001: it was rancid with TCA. A heartbreaker, that.

I agree that most of the folks along the wine trail that haven’t had the experience of properly aged wines simply haven’t had the opportunity to experience a “light bulb” wine and when they do, they GET IT!

Seeking out a retail establishment with a good track record and working with them for properly aged specimens is probably the best way to obtain them. Once they experience one of these “experience wines,” it shows them what wine *can* be, rather than the immediate gratification drink of the week.

I couldn’t agree more. Champagne represents some of the most complex wines in the market. The marginal climate means that ageing wines whether they are base wines (NV) or on lees is paramount to achieving complexity.

To put things into perspective we can purchase Grand and Premier Cru wines from champagne at a fraction of the price of top Bordeaux/Burgundy and they have age on them too.

In any case it seems that everyone here has hit on the high points, but here are the reasons that I could see such an idea existing: a) young drinkers have no access to aged wines, b) since this generation is producing far more wine drinkers than ever before they mostly come from non-wine families, thus no cellar to inherit and no time yet to have built one’s own, c) attempts and experiments with sourcing aged wines can be inherently frustrating, expensive, and prone to extremely high rates of failure due to both storage issues and production issues, d) pure cost concerns

I am sure that I could think of more, but these seem to be the most relevant, with simple lack of exposure the biggest of those problems. You may occasionally get the opinion asserted by Rachel above, of preferring very potent wines to those whose tannins have softened by age. However, this seems far more of an issue of nascent wine drinkers than younger wine drinkers (with the two quite logically often going hand-in-hand), and so to the list we can add…

f) Robert Parker and his ilk have created a generation of tannin-crazed, residual sugar addicted, vino-bots who will require extensive deprogramming in the years to come. Luckily I think the actual younger wine drinkers will be exposed to the inevitable (and quite visible) return swing of the density and manipulation pendulum and will cut teeth on wines that speak a bit more at least of place and finesse. Or so I hope.

Still with more wine than I will possibly ever drink up, I am blessed and cursed with this enormous list of older wines from which I am able to pull rare bottles on interesting occasions.

Two that thrilled recently were 1975 Heitz Martha’s Vineyard tasted from magnum and drinking perfectly. The ’74 Marths’s is justifiably considered one of the finest CA wines in the last fifty years, but the ’75, while lighter, has a nice elegant quality, and this wine that was very good on its own, was simply spectacular along side a slab of medium-rare roast beef au jus. Not a hint of over age and plenty of nuance that came out with the food.

The other wine of note recently was Beaulieu Private Res 1970. This wine was my first ever case purchase and I was lucky enough, or silly enough, to add a bit to that at the cost of $8 a bottle. I still have several left, and when I pulled one out for a dinner of West Coast blogger types, it was beginning to show a bit of a tired edge. But here is the thing. If what is required is primary fruit, then aging wine to forty years is a waste of space and electricity. But, if part of the joy is being able to know old friends across their many twists and turns, then this no longer perfect wine was still very special. It certainly had not died. It just was no longer fruity or juicy. And, by the way, very few Bordeaux ’70s, a vintage that was considered the best of the decade over there, have outlasted this wine.

Just a couple of other comments. Tasted CA and WA Merlots, 1994 to 1997, the other day. Expected the 94s to show poorly because they were so fruit forward when young. No such problem. They were layered, rich, still had some primary fruit (Duncan Wilcox’s girlfriend would have approved) yet had become fairly sophisticated. The 97s, at higher alcohols, were not as good but, at 13 years old, were still hanging in there.

All of which leads me to this. We hear a lot of anxiety (and some moaning) about the change in CA wines and how the new breed will not age. Funny thing is that we heard the same complaint with the CA Cabs of the 1970s. The Paris tasting of 1976 was decried by the very French tasters who chose those CA wines first because “they were so much easier to taste when young, but they won’t age”. Well, they have aged perfectly well–as so many comments above confirm. The same thing is going to happen to the balanced wines of the past decade. Out of balance wines never aged well. Balanced wines, and most highly regarded Napa Valley Cabs are pretty well-balanced, are also going to age well despite having moved up a point or so in alcohol level. A little less gnashing of teeth is in order re the aging of those wines simply because we have been down this road before and have proven that balanced Cabs from a top provenance age well.

The same will be true for CA Chards. The Rameys, DuMols, Hudsons, Marimars, Gary Farrells are going to age well. We have ten years of experience with those wines at higher alcohols. They are not falling apart.