Ubicación general

BY LETTIE TEAGUE

“Aged like a fine wine”: Has this phrase become more of a marketing tool than a relevant wine-drinking fact? Has aging wine become an outmoded custom?

After all, nearly every wine in the world today is made to be con-sumed soon after it’s bottled. (I’ve seen figures as high as 99%.) Wine drinkers seem willing to do their part. According to Bear Dalton, wine buyer for Spec’s, a Houston-based wine store chain, nearly 98%

of his customers drink the bottles they buy in under a week.

At Calvert Woodley in Washington, D.C., proprietor Ed Sands posits that 90% of his customers drink their wines quickly, so most of his inventory is comprised of wines meant to be consumed within two years or so. Even at Sherry-Lehmann in New York, a bastion of blue-chip (aka age-worthy) Bordeaux, nearly half the store’s cus-tomers are buying wines under $15 a bottle, according to the

com-pany’s president, Chris Adams. Mr. Adams lamented that not many wine drinkers were likely to experience the enormous pleasure that a well-aged wine could bestow.

Mr. Adams had a point, though I couldn’t help wondering how many people would share this regret. It isn’t just that a well-aged wine can cost so much money or require a long wait (Americans don’t like their pleasures deferred)—there’s also the question of flavor.

An aged wine tastes very different from a wine that is young. In the place of dazzling, bright fruit, there’s subtle restraint. While the tan-nins may soften, the fruit may be dim a bit, too, replaced by flavors more earthy or mineral—flavors that are not necessarily familiar or easy to like. Of course, this happens only with age-worthy wines:

Non-ageable wines that are left unopened for years usually just taste tired, dried out—and old.

All age-worthy wines have certain attributes in common, the most important of which is acidity. Wines that are low in acidity can be easy to enjoy while young, but they don’t mature very well—think of the perpetual adolescents who fail to ever become adults.

White wines that are high in acidity—like German and Austrian Riesling, not to mention Chablis, Champagne and Chenin Blanc—can improve for decades, though much depends on producer and vintage. A wine from a too-warm vintage may lack sufficient acidity, while a wine from a too-cold vintage may not have com-pletely ripe fruit. If a wine isn’t in balance, it won’t age well.

In ageable reds, tannins are an important component—they serve as both preservative and frame. Tannins are derived from both barrels and grapes and while all grapes have tannins, some, such as Cabernet,

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Nebbiolo and Syrah, possess tannins that are particularly strong.

Some great ageable wines are made from these grapes (Bordeaux, Barolo, Hermitage), though a lot of mediocre wines are made from them as well. The difference is a matter of winemaking talent, loca-tion and vine age, and all the mysterious components that make up terroir.

Wines that are high in extract (the components of the wine that aren’t acids, water or alcohol) also tend to age more sturdily. That’s one of the reasons that winemakers strive to make wines of greater extraction, though it also happens to be the fashion in winemaking right now, as winemakers try to make wines of maximum concentra-tion, both in flavor and color. It’s possible to take this too far, how-ever: over-extracted wine can be bitter and coarse.

Most of all, an age-worthy wine needs a track record—historical proof that it has actually improved over time, many times. That’s one reason for the high cost of great Bordeaux. Great Bordeaux have a long track record—longer than most other wines in the world.

But none of this matters if the wine isn’t well-stored. No wine is age-worthy if it’s stashed in a closet or left on the floor. The latter was actually the preferred location of a late wine writer and friend of mine who “stored” everything from cheap Cabernet to first-growth Bor-deaux along the edges of his living-room rug. Dinners at his house were a fraught mixture of desire and dashed hope as pedigreed bottles were opened and poured—into glasses and down the kitchen sink.

The expense of storage is another reason so few wine drinkers might think about aging wine—and for restaurateurs, it’s much the same. Few restaurants have the space or the deep pockets to keep

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tles that they won’t be selling for decades. One of the exceptions is Crabtree’s Kittle House in Chappaqua, N.Y., where there are dozens of affordable wines on the list, in part because its cellar is so large.

Glenn Vogt, the general manager and wine director, has bottles he admits he has lost track of—and happily, he seems to have lost track of the pricing as well. I had an excellent 10-year-old Chablis there last year that cost $25 a bottle.

But even ownership of a cellar doesn’t mean some people won’t drink their wines young. Mr. Dalton told me that he has some clients who fly to Napa every year in private planes, buy up dozens of bot-tles of cult Cabernets—and drink them soon after they return home to Texas.

This may be one reason so many Napa Cabernets are styled dif-ferently these days, made with riper fruit and more upfront appeal.

Bordeaux-trained Philippe Melka, who makes some of the most sought-after Cabernets in the Valley (Vineyard 29, Dana Estates), says he is making wines that are more approachable than they were a decade ago.

Age-worthy wine may not (yet) be obsolete, but its biggest chal-lenge—beyond money, time and proper storage—may be the belief of a buyer in a bottle, the conviction that something truly transforma-tive can take place. Aging wine is, above all else, an act of faith.

This article originally ran on Feb. 11, 2012, under the headline “Does Good Wine Come to Those Who Wait?”

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