Wine Myth: Wine gets better with age.

Wine is different with age, whether it gets better or worse simply comes down to personal taste preference. I establish a preferred drinking window for each wine based on the producer and vintage .

The only fail proof method is to buy a case and taste it periodically given that you chose the vintage wisely in the first place.

Which is what I do. I never buy just one bottle of anything.

@MoutonIsAClaret Well, I did. Rayas, only one bottle 😉

@MoutonIsAClaret I always buy at least 3 bottles of any wine that I buy so that I get a feel how they evolve over time

@MoutonIsAClaret I used to do that to, even 6 in the beginning, but with 1200 bottles in cellar I begin to wonder when we will drink all those wines..😉

@MoutonIsAClaret I don’t buy as much wine these days for that very reason you state. . Mainly just drawing from inventory. Good thing as the Burgundy prices have skyrocketed over the past decade.

Most modern wine is made for immediate consumption, not meant to age. Also an age worthy wine, needs to be properly stored for it to improve. I have some old wine, but they are not drinkable. I just keep them for conversation.

Mouton 1986 is still too young for my palate 😂

A good wine is good from the beginning.

Stephen - I really appreciated this but it needs to be noted the video clip is from the YouTube channel No Sediment, hosted by Latvian sommelier Agnese Gintere interviewing renowned wine expert Michael Schuster. Here’s a link to the whole interview:

Few years in a cellar and you will get most of your wine....but finding that sweet spot depends upon wine...I age my wines in my cellar from 2 to 6 years...I open one bottle to try it and than decide and put sticker in which year it will be IMHO best...

That's very good practice. I've had many conversations with wine collectors. It's really about the wines power and balance. Those with power and balance can be enjoyed at anytime, and you'll find that they usually outperform anything else even with age. You may find a wine that's over tannic, but then there's a thought of, will the fruit in the wine outlast that backward nature. Some don't. Ultimately it boils down to the winemaker. How can you express this wine whatever that vintage gave you and at the same time make a wine with longevity. Some are better at it than others.

Great years from good winemakers make wines worthy of aging. Ordinary years, even from top winemakers are meant to be drunk young. I don’t care if you’re a first growth, if Mother Nature wasn’t present, all your know how and technical expertise can’t make up for it.

You're right and there are deliberate things that a winemaker can do to a wine to give it more weight in weaker vintages. The only issue I've found is that in some cases they've overdone it. The tannins from the oak can outlast the fruit in the wine. A goodwine maker will make a weak vintage with weight and will state, drink it early.

And price it accordingly. Unfortunately this is not the case 90% of the time. Bordeaux is the biggest culprit here.

💯

Rome ran the ultimate test of this one. The 121 BC "Opimian" vintage was so famous that Romans claimed to be tasting it nearly 200 years later, by which point, Pliny says, it had thickened like honey and was fit only for seasoning younger wines. The fame aged. The wine didn't.

Interesting. Actually most of wines over 15 years are either dead or they have the magic of tertiary smell/taste that you cannot find on young wines. That does not apply to most of whites.

Michael Schuster was my wine tutor for 10 years. He used to run fine wine courses for MW students, wine writers, wine buyers, and collectors. I used to only attend the Bordeaux sessions, though I also popped into Loire, and Super Tuscanny. We went through many horizontals including the 1996, and 2000 vintages at 20 years. Head to head you could certainly see the weakness of many of those wines. Many were flailing. We were taught to objectively to examine the wines whether we liked them or not was immaterial.

Indeed. On a vertical is where you have the real chance to experience the difference of aging. Most times cork is fading and wine is dead, but when all works well, magic appears on 25-30 year old reserves.

@jwalkermobile

Bullshit artist. Ask him about Rudy Kurniawan? Rudy bought cheap bottles of supermarket wine and relabelled them as vintage and sold thousands of bottles and made $millions. He was caught, not because of the taste of the wine but because he labelled a wine bottle incorrectly.

File this under #whogivesafuck

Wine’s (mostly) badly treated ITB. No amount of cellaring in average cellars going to contribute

Excellent English

Idiot. Wine does get better with age if its stored properly. That’s why vintage means so much.

Some wines get better with age, some do not. The tragedy is waiting for some to ‘come around’ and they never do. 1994 Bin 707 or 1987 Yarra Yerring. Both unappealing in youth, blossomed after 5-10 years. Most surprising was a Champagne from 1942. No bubbles but weirdly enticing!

The truth is they don't, and logic kicks in. They are either good to start with or they aren't. Let's take an example of a 100 point wine Vs one at 92 points. Which wine improves with age?

That’s a false binary. A wine can excellent young and age well. It can be awkward young and become excellent. A 100 point wine can be built for drinking in 5 years. So this discussion which is ‘they get better’ vs ‘they were either good or not’ are not the only possibilities.

Where's the discrepancy? Scores are, or should be, based on objectivity; something that can only truly be learned. So, while you might say a wine is improving with age, I might taste it and identify a list of its faults.

Neither ‘improves’ in the sense you mean. They change. 100 point wines on release can be unforgiving, 10 years later they blossom. You get what the 100 points indicated. The 92 wine was already showing its hand. Age doesn’t invent quality that wasn’t there.

Let’s not quibble over ‘evolve’ vs ‘blossom’. You say that quality is fixed at the start and aging doesn’t improve it. I say that some wines (by no means all) need time to express their inherent quality.

I'm not quibbling; it's just a gap in understanding. Let's go back to Penfolds. Did you know that every vintage is a blend of grapes from different vineyards? This means that the wine never truly maintains a consistent profile, which is a bit off-putting. I did a tasting with them and they brought out a Yarra Yering from the '90s as a surprise. When I tasted it, I instantly knew the wine was dead.

Blending and aging are different issues. Penfolds uses multiple vineyards to create a house style; that doesn’t mean that the wine is dead on day one. A dead 1990’s YY (different producer, one bottle) only proves the point I already made; not all wines need time. Some do.

@brutdecuve This is dumb. The better the wine, the better it gets with age with almost no exceptions