• To cork or not to cork? Age-worthy wines can be sealed with natural cork or screwcap.
• We have our own flavour preferences, and shouldn't bow to the tyranny of elite ideas of wine maturity.

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Rod Phillips Cautions That Aging Wine Isn't An Extreme Sport

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, AT A WINE AND food festival in western Canada, I went to a tasting of all the First Growth Bordeaux wines from the acclaimed 1961 vintage. The organizers had sourced the wines - several bottles of each - from the cellars of the châteaux themselves, to ensure that they had been kept in the best possible condition over the previous 40-something years. But at least two of these great wines were gone. Dead. They lacked much flavour and they were thin and acidic.

To say it was disappointing is an under-statement, and it didn't help that the panel leading the tasting praised all the wines to the skies. Clearly some of the bottles had survived better than others. (It didn't help that the tasting cost a couple of hundred dollars, either!)

A year or two before that, I was with a media group visiting a well-known Australian winery in Coonawarra. The winemaker treated us to a broken vertical of one of the winery's best-known wines, but the examples from the 1960s were dead. Still, the winemaker, who was leading the tasting, praised the insipid liquid, and I recall her saying something like, "You can tell, even from the way they are now, how wonderful they must have been!"

"How wonderful they must have been!" I thought. "Why would you do that to a 'wonderful' wine?" It struck me as a bit like putting a Picasso in direct sunlight for a couple of years, then looking at the faded result and marvelling, "you can see how wonderful it must have looked!"

Now, it's true that wineries often keep wines well past their expected best-before date for good reason: to monitor how they age over the long term. But I have a sense that some consumers do the same thing in the beliefs that (a) all wines benefit from aging and (b) the older a wine is, the better it becomes.

I quite often get e-mails from people, telling me they have a bottle of some ordinary wine, now 10 or 12 years old, but that was intended to last three or four, and wondering if it's time to drink it. My advice is to open it and try it - but to make sure they have a back-up bottle on hand in the likely event that their old bottle is undrinkable.

Despite these examples, figuring out which wines will keep over the medium or long term, and which won't, isn't a problem for the vast majority of wine consumers. Only a very small percentage have anything like a cellar, and that can range from hundreds of bottles in a purpose-built room to a dozen or two bottles in a wine fridge or in boxes in a cupboard under the stairs. With few exceptions, wine consumers buy wine the way they buy other commodities: as they need it.

But if you do want to age wines, rather than buy older vintages (what you might think of as 'pre-aged') you need to have some idea of why aging wine can be a good idea, and what happens to wine as it ages.

As a general principle, the point of aging wine is to give it time to change and improve - and these are quite different things, as we'll see. Most of the ordinary wines we buy in wine shops and liquor stores will not change with time. They won't "age" in any meaningful sense; they'll simply stay the same, but get older, until they start to degrade.

Applied to wine, the idea of "aging" refers to a process where the flavour and textures of wines that are made for longer-term keeping (they're called vins de garde) change slowly but perceptibly. It's a chemical process, but few consumers are interested in understanding the science behind it. (The same goes for knowing the chemistry at work with regard to the difference serving temperature makes to a wine's perceived texture.)

And there's still debate about some aspects of aging. For example, some winemakers insist that wines made for aging should be sealed with a natural cork, because it lets in minute quantities of oxygen which, they say, is needed for the aging process to take place. Others insist that wine evolves anaerobically - without any more oxygen than there is in the bottle when it's sealed. They tend to favour airtight seals such as screw caps.

But if you cellar wine for aging, it's useful to have a sense of the parameters of the process.
For one thing, the flavours of wine tend to become more complex with age, and they also change in their character. Typically, they lose any of the bright, vibrant fruitiness they showed as young wines, and take on the more muted, complex and structured flavours that we associate with maturity.

The colour of a wine also changes as it ages. Many red wines have purple or bright ruby highlights when they're young but, as they age, they tend to become less intense and to take on notes of brick, orange and even brown. White wines tend to darken, to an extent that some move into the amber zone.

While these changes take place, the wine needs to be preserved, and the most important natural preservatives in wine are tannins, for red wines, and acids for whites. For that reason, young wines made for longer-term aging tend to be too tannic or acidic for enjoyable drinking while they're young. Open a young Second Growth Bordeaux when it's a couple of years old, and you get little more than a puckering mouthful of tannins. Wait five or 10 years, and the tannins are much less perceptible and the flavours shine through. Successful aging means that a balance is achieved among the tannins, the fruit and the acids.

What happens to the tannins as they soften and to the colouring matter as it loses intensity? As they interact and form bigger and bigger complex compounds, they become too big and start to fall out of the liquid as solids. They form the sediment that often collects in bottles of aged wine. They're the reason for decanting wine - to eliminate the sediment from the wine that you pour into a glass.

But all red wines have fruit, acid, colouring and tannins in them, so how do you know which are suitable for aging?

Some estimates are that maybe 10 percent of all reds and five percent of all white wines will benefit from aging five years or more but, when I think of the millions upon millions of bottles of ready-to-drink wine, those percentages strike me as high. It's just an impression, but I think half that is more realistic.

That said, there are some grape varieties that are more likely than others to produce wines that benefit from aging - varieties rich in fruit, acids, tannins and/or colour. The more common reds include Shiraz/Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Pinot Noir and Sangiovese. Among the whites, Riesling and Chardonnay stand out.

Yet most wines made from these varieties are made for early drinking. How do you tell the difference between a $10 Merlot from Chile, which will keep for a couple of years, from a $100 Merlot from Pomerol which will last for a couple of decades?

One way is to look for advice. Sometimes you'll find it on the back label, sometimes in reviews that suggest holding the wine for this or that number of years. You can check the producer's website or ask advice from the wine consultant where you buy your wine. As a general principle, though, you can assume that inexpensive, mass-produced wine should be drunk within a few years of being released for sale. Absent any other information, price alone might be a fairly good indicator of age-worthiness.

The final point about the aging process relates to the final phase. Wines don't evolve positively forever. Their components mature and integrate over a number of years, and then plateau for a period during which they remain unchanged. After that, however, they begin to degrade, and progressively lose the balance, integration and qualities they achieve during the aging process. Before long, they reach the dismal state of those wines from the 1960s that were so disappointing.

Ideally, everyone will tell you, you should buy a case of any wine you want to put away to age. Then try a bottle every few years, and when the wine has reached a stage that's to your liking, start drinking what's left. In the real world of wine ownership, though, most people put aside single bottles, or perhaps a couple. The best advice is to look for advice and, if you're uncertain when to drink the wine, err on the side of youth. It's far better to enjoy a wine a bit too early than to open it and find that it has lost all its flavour, balance and body.

Then, too, not every likes the same style of wine. Mature Bordeaux, which are still often considered the apex of the wine experience, are simply not to everyone's taste. I remember asking Aimé Guibert, owner of the iconic Mas de Daumas Gassac winery in southern France, how long he thought one of his wines should be cellared. He replied, "As long as you want; it depends what sort of wine you like. Wine is like the sun. In the morning, it can be soft and diffuse; at noon, it can be bright and harsh; in the evening it's muted and cool. Some people prefer it in the morning, some at noon, some in the evening. Wine is like that, too."

It's a bit cryptic, but it makes the point that we have our own flavour and texture preferences, and shouldn't bow to the tyranny of elite ideas of wine maturity. After all, it's only recently, in the history of wine, that we've valued aged wine in this way. Until a couple of hundred years ago, wine was unstable and tended to degrade fairly quickly, so that younger wines fetched higher prices than older wines. Now, wine aging has become almost an extreme sport, as people hang onto wine (waiting for that "special occasion") way past its best-by date. If you wait for the special occasion until it's your own funeral, you've missed the point about enjoying wine.

Properly aged wine is different from young wine, and some wines do demand aging before they're drinkable. But it's important to remember that aging wine is a means to an end - to produce a more drinkable wine, or one that's more to your taste than when it's young - and not an end in itself.