A Complete Guide to Aging Wine (And Why You Probably Shouldn’t Bother)
Truly.
I hope you enjoy reading The Sauce as much as I enjoy writing it. This is a reader-supported publication. Your paid subscriptions mean I have the time to research and write about food culture as an independent entity. No #sponcon, no shilling products I don’t care about, just a whole lot of commentary about how food and drink fit into modern society.
This week is a re-write of an article I originally published on Medium.com last year. Ageing wine is a tricky (and sometimes contentious) subject that I wanted to tackle for anyone interested in this weird and unpredictable world.
I once threw a $1200 bottle of wine down the drain (for those interested, it was 1975 Penfold’s Grange).
I could have sold it. This was a highly sought-after, very rare wine which was kindly gifted by a random man who once came into my bar and left me with 12 bottles of his late father’s aged wines.
Wines like this can sell for thousands even if they’re in a terrible state.
But I believe wine is for drinking, not investing, so I opened it with some wine trade friends instead.
Perhaps I should have bent my own rule this time.
But many people think that aging wine is a Good Thing. I can name you at least a handful of wine bars around Europe that refuse to sell anything that hasn’t seen at least five years in a dusty cellar, regardless of the wine.
But here’s what I believe. Badly aged wine is terrible. And in my experience, unless the wine is kept in bond or other “perfect” conditions, most of it is kept terribly and for far, far too long.
But hey, I’m not one to stand in the way of a decent aged bottle. And what is life if not a lottery? If you are in the market for aging wine, this is what you need to know.
And why I would still tell you not to bother (most of the time).
A lot of modern wine isn’t designed to age
Back in the day, wine could certainly be age-worthy. A lot of the big names in aged wine — Bordeaux, Barolo, Burgundy — were designed to be aged, either by intention or circumstance. It wasn’t uncommon to age these wines to soften them up (some could be *ahem* rustic).
Nowadays, rustic wines aren’t such a problem. Winemaking technology has changed.
People’s taste in wine has changed too, preferring softer, fuller-bodied, fruitier reds with lower tannin. Changes to winemaking technology mean we can make fresh, fruity, white wine designed to be drunk young which was an impossibility back in the day.
Arguably, many of these changes originated with one man, wine critic Robert Parker. Parker made his name by declaring the very hot 1982 vintage “superb” when other critics thought it terrible. He had a taste for big, boozy red wines (the sort a hot vintage will make) and in the years following 1982, he became so influential that a good Parker score could be the making of a winery.
So, many winemakers changed their ways, moving away from age-worthy but hard-to-drink wines to alcoholic grape juice that goes down smooth but has less structure than a cookie dipped in tea.
Which means if you want to age wine, you’ve got to look towards the old school.
If you want to age wine look for this holy trinity
Acid
Tannin
Flavour concentration
The secret but most probably important bonus fourth point is that you want to source wines that are designed to age.
If your wine doesn’t have these four elements, it will never age properly.
While most modern wine is generally designed to be drunk young (thus requiring less of those four elements), there are still old-school winemakers who do things the old-fashioned way.
Wine regions are a good place to start, including but not limited to:
Barolo, Italy
Alsace, France
Mosel and Rheingau, Germany
Brunello di Montalcino, Italy
Sweet wines like Sauternes in Bordeaux
Hunter Valley, Australia
Ribera del Duero, Spain
Bandol, France
Rioja, Spain
Port
It’s no coincidence that all these regions are either incredibly old or take their lead from the old world.
There are also grape varieties that are more age-worthy than others, including but not limited to:
Riesling
Semillon
Nebbiolo
Sangiovese
Tempranillo
Cabernet Sauvignon
Yet again, it’s no coincidence that these grapes grow in the aforementioned regions.
But — and it’s a big but — this is where things get complicated.
Although there are many wines that will age fantastically in these regions, there are plenty that won’t.
Price isn’t necessarily a factor either. I’ve had both amazing cheap and bad expensive aged wine.
There are also plenty of regions where winemakers craft wines that age beautifully when everyone else around them is making wines to be drunk today.
Finally, there is the wildcard element. As
aptly says:Just as with a person, we never know exactly how a wine will mature over the years. Putting a wine away for three or five or ten or twenty years is an investment only in being able to open a unique wine in the future.
That’s what makes wine so wildly interesting and wildly infuriating. It’s uncontrollable. And if you want to age a wine, you must be prepared to go through the heartache of opening something you’ve stored for decades only to discover you shouldn’t have.
Which could happen more often than you think, because….
Most aged wine tastes terrible (and other unpopular opinions)
I feel bad for saying this, but I’ve never gotten the appeal of aged wine.
Yes, sometimes you can hit the nail with the head of the corkscrew and get a fantastic bottle. I have done.
But it’s never guaranteed.
Age strips fruity flavours out of wines and replaces them with “tertiary” flavours. These include flavours like earth, tobacco, mushroom, or leather in reds and “Sherry” notes or wax in white.
Tertiary flavours are not something I care for, especially in reds.
This is an interesting point in itself. It blows my mind that most people think reds are better-aged than whites because I’ve long believed the opposite to be true. I’ve tried many stunning aged white wines and very few excellent aged reds.
Fortified wine is also a good exception. I’ve been lucky enough to try Ports as far back as 1878 and they have almost all been beautiful.
More than the tertiary flavours is the fact that many aged wines die well before they are opened. Quite often this is down to being aged improperly or for too long. There are other factors like a faulty cork.
Like I say, ageing wine is highly unpredictable.
And therein lies one of the biggest problems…
Most wines are not stored well enough to age
If you want to age wine for decades, you need a very specific set of conditions:
A constant temperature — around 11–14C (52–57F).
High humidity — around 65–75%.
Dark, quiet and free from vibrations.
Winery cellars naturally have these conditions which is why the best-aged wines are the ones that are never moved from the place they were first laid down.
And it’s why people pay to keep their wines in wine-friendly storage units.
If you keep your wine in your house — even in good conditions — it’s a lottery as to if it’ll age well. And honestly, that lottery can cost you a lot of money, not just with the wine itself but with storage.
It can also — for fear of sounding over dramatic — cause a lot of heartache. I’ve heard stories of people buying birth-year wine for their kid to open on their 18th birthday just to find out it’s dead.
The question is, do you think it’s worth it?
It’s not all bad news
There are some happy accidents in the world of aging wine, some of which don’t have to cost a fortune.
Back in 2013, the British wine trade got in a tizzy because a supermarket was discounting a very good 2006 Australian Hunter Valley Semillon to $5 a pop.
I chanced it and bought a pack of 12. I’m still drinking them today and they’re still incredible.
Just this week I managed to pick up a bottle of 2006 Rioja from an excellent producer for $16 in a Spanish supermarket. The current vintage of this wine is 2018 so I can only assume they found a bottle languishing in the store room.
It was awesome.
And last night I drank a bottle of 2013 Portuguese white for $12. The winemaker hadn’t made this wine to age but realised it was developing that way, so they kept it in bottle for way longer than they intended to.
Why did these cheaper wines all work? Well, partly it’s that wildcard thing again. But I also reduced my chances of a bad bottle because:
They were made by very good producers whose top priorities are flavour concentration and balance.
Rioja and Hunter Valley Australian Semillon are known to be age-worthy regions using age-worthy grape varieties.
They are not that old. We’re not talking 50 years, we’re talking 18, tops.
There are other factors too.
The Hunter Valley Semillon for instance was aged under a screw cap which, contrary to popular belief can aid in a long ageing process because is slows the oxygen intake.
But the biggest factor? They were the exception. Not the rule.
Honestly, aging wine is almost always not worth it other than for curiosity. Sure, many people want to try a wine that was made pre-World War II, their birth year, or some other auspicious date. And you can bet your last bottle that I’ll be the first in line for a taste of an old wine.
But is it worth tying up your money, space, and time? Not unless you have plenty of all three.
Like I always say, wine is personal. If you want to take a crack at ageing wine, you do you. Just remember:
Know your winemaker and go old-school
Look for the holy trinity of acid, flavour concentration and tannin
Store it really well
Bon courage!
It’s an interesting topic this, and one I’m quite torn about. I think it’s quite right that of loads of wine being stored in the wrong conditions and in that case there just is no point. But when everything comes together, and the vintage is good, from a producer that knows their stuff, age can unlock something ethereal beyond mere tertiary aromas that you just don’t find in younger wines. While my taste library isn’t the largest when it comes to older vintages, I’ve been lucky enough to share a couple of bottles of Ch. Palmer ‘83 (as recently as last year), and that had just the sort of magic I’m talking about. Then again, with that price tag, you’d hope so. For me however I’d agree that age shows itself most wonderfully in whites. Burgundy in particular. Or a £10 bottle of mid 80’s Riesling I picked up years ago… who knows where magic is hidden, and that’s why people get burned.
I've thought for a long time whether modern wines age in the same way as they did in the past, so thank you for confirming that many are different now (through different techniques). The mention of Robert Parker was simply fascinating as well! Thanks for this.