Some Excuses For Drinking Wine As Soon As Possible
It’s culturally implicit that wine is best consumed years after it was bought. But is this just a myth? It is an all too rarely acknowledged fact: any decent wine can be consumed instantly.. When you leave certain wines in the cellar, the do indeed become better tasting after a few years. But these wines are actually in the minority. In fact, you may find that some wines are prone to becoming much worse. Some experts have opined that 10% of red wine and a pitiful 5% of white wine will actually see some kind of benefit from aging. And even then, only 1% of all wine is worth leaving in the bottle for over a decade, despite the astronomical prices it’s possible to spend on some particularly old vintages.
Personally, I wouldn’t even consider investigating white wine aging. There just isn’t enough potential in it. Rather than being a black mark on White wine, it just makes selecting a great white even easier. Sauvignon Blanc wine and those other common supermarket whites are great tasting the instant you buy them, with no twiddling of thumbs. You’re not getting a wine that ‘won’t get any better’. You’re getting a wine that ‘doesn’t need to get any better’. Exceptions to the rule abound, as they so often do. But frankly, the time and money you invest will be gambled with little pay off. A Gewurztraminer wine from a worthwhile producer and vineyard, using the right fruit in the right year, may just be the best example you ever drink in 10 years time. But more often than not, it will taste bitter and uninspiring. With every sip you’ll curse your younger self for the fun they could have been having (ok, perhaps not).
The reason behind white wine’s aging inflexibility is that the white wine fermentation process doesn’t expose the juice to the stems and skins of the grape. Those varieties that involve leaving the skins on, will shortly remove them anyway. Leaving the skins on red wine is done primarily for the colour it gives the wine, because it has the detrimental effect of releasing not especially nice tasting ‘tannins’ into the wine. Their effect is however, counter acted by several years of maturation in the bottle. Hence, a nice red wine like a Barolo will generally be released several years after fermentation.
Tags: Investments, tips, vintage, wine
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 14th, 2011 at 2:26 pm and is filed under wine club. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.