She is well preserved for her age’ is often a crude but well-meaning quip that emanates from an ogling male.
It’s a backhanded compliment at best, but showcases the centuries-old obsession we humans have about ageing. It even inspires greeting card companies to pen age-centric humour in their birthday cards. Wine geeks indulge in the same obsession when they wax poetic about the age of their wines. The myth they inadvertently espouse, is: older the wine, the better.
Far from the truth, an older wine is only as good as it’s cellaring. From its genesis and in its voyage to barrel and bottle, the young grape gets its share of grooming from the land, the weather, the wine maker, the winery, shipper to steamer before it’s put up for adoption, dressed in its Sunday best, to land a bidder with the largest wad. This crib to chalice journey is long and hard, and unintended aging is the price the young wine pays.
Yet most wines are ready to be had when they show up on the shelves because they were crafted for instant gratification.
Then there are French Bordeaux and Burgundies which were meant to be put away for noble aging, some as much as twenty even thirty years. A few years ago I uncorked a Chateau Talbot 1961, perhaps Bordeaux’s best vintage ever. The arrogant maitre’d and our even more arrogant waiter (the customer is always wrong in France) at the three star Michelin bistro at Le Beaux in the south of France went through a frog to prince metamorphosis minutes after uncorking the Talbot, as the heavenly whiff snaked its way around the intimate dining room carved out of the cliffs of LeBeaux. The guests applauded and we invited the waiter to share a sip of the heavenly juice. The wine had shown triumph of cellaring, not just a magnificent vintage and vintner. I should know — I’ve had a ’59, a ’45, even a ’78 — all glorious Bordeaux vintages went vinegar on me, a legacy of poor cellaring prior to my securing them.
There’s grand aging and shock aging.
The former is to be desired, the latter to be avoided.
Grand aging occ urs when a wine crafted for aging meets an owner who understands cellaring and has optimal cellaring infrastructure.
That does not mean he or she should necessarily have an ornate cellar with all the cooling gizmos found in a nuclear reactor. Although I submit, it helps. The thrill of going to your cellar pre-party fells like time travel to another microclimate with feverish anticipation, to extract an aging beauty from her beauty sleep.
But if you are not planning a wine cellar next to your media room in that grand estate that you are building on the beach, know the evils of shock aging. They are simple to remember, harder to execute. Wine hates light, noise, vibration and fumes. So an upstairs room with plenty of sunlight with a window facing noisy traffic on one side and your garage fumes on the other, next to a washer and dryer would be akin to the death chamber for your wines. If you nodded to any of the above, don your swami robe and dispatch your wines to the Rishikesh part of your home.
Or avoid storage altogether. The eat-what-you-kill approach, which translates to drink them as you buy them, works very well for most new world wines, including California, Australia, South Africa, Argentina and Chile. Indian wines, I’m guessing, would be the same. And as for storing yesterday’s unfinished wine, fugged about it as my Brooklyn friends would say. Make sangria with fresh-cut oranges, apples and sweet lime.
— The writer is a veteran Wall Streeter and wine enthusiast with several certifications. ash_ranjan@ml.com