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Lizzie, our web guru, has asked me to reply to a question about why wine improves with age. Someone asked the question on a forum, and the Wikipedia answer in response was “When properly stored, wines not only maintain their quality but many actually improve in aroma, flavour, and complexity as they mature.” Not very helpful.
And of course it isn’t true of all wines - in fact it isn’t true of most wines. It’s easier to understand if we restrict ourselves initially to red wines.
Let’s Look At Red Wine
Glass of red wine
Wines do change over time, but mostly that just means they go off. Most obviously, their colour degrades. If you take a wine from last year, and compare it with a 2004, for example, you’ll see the new wine is very purple.
Although on their own they’ll both look a lovely, deep red (assuming they’re any good), comparing one with the other, you should easily be able to decide that one is ‘purple‘, the other ‘ruby‘.
This colour degradation will continue over time until the wine becomes almost brown, and eventually begins to break down and appear as sediment in solution.
Tannins
The way to slow down this degradation is to have high tannin levels in the wine to start with - the tannins give structure to the wine, and allow it to be stored for a long period of time.
This doesn’t mean that adding a lot of tannin to any wine means it can be kept for decades. The balancing act is that if a wine is to be stored over a long period, it must have high tannin levels. With high tannin levels from the pips and skins, the wine can be stored longer in oak, and even in new oak, without overpowering the wine. Length of time in oak, and the use of new oak, both add to tannin content of a wine.
Cabernet Sauvignon
The classic red wine grape with high tannin content is cabernet sauvignon. This is the traditional grape used to add ‘structure’ to a wine. That’s why clarets can be stored for so long.
Wine makers in Chianti found that improving techniques were producing wines worth keeping longer. So they introduced small amounts of cabernet sauvignon to give the wine the necessary structure to hold it all together while the wine aged and mellowed.
But Not All Wines Improve With Age
So, not all wines improve with age. As I’ve explained, if a wine does improve with age, it needs high levels of tannin to provide the structure that prevents the wine from degrading.
Then it’s a question of luck - does all that tannin from the grapes and the barrels produce a taste that is pleasing on the palate? High levels of tannin in a young wine taste very bitter - you can gauge the level of tannin by swilling the wine around the front of your teeth. If they feel rough and dry, that’s tannin, a foolproof test.
Wine Warning
These wines need to be left for the maturing process to work its miracle. That’s why some wines come with a warning - not to be drunk for 5, 10 or even 15 years. Almost always this means the winemaker has decided that the best this wine can ever get is if it is matured for x years with y amount of tannins from leaving the wine on the skins, and z amount of tannins from storing in oak for a certain amount of time, with a certain percentage of new oak.
Changing any of these variables will change the time when the wine is at its optimum, but the pleasantness of the wine at the new optimum will be less, in the view of the winemaker.
And the longer the winemaker has decided is the optimum time, the more undrinkable the wine will be as a young wine. For example, a really high quality Pauillac like Mouton Rothschild will be primarily cabernet sauvignon, kept for a while on the skins and stored primarily in new oak. After 12 years it will be mellow and beautiful. After 3 years it would be very bitter indeed.
It’s About Balance Too
But you can’t take a Vin de Pays de l’Herault, or an ordinary Pinotage from California, leave the skins in, use lots of new oak and store it for 20 years. Yuk! Very, very acidic, with no balancing fruit. It’s about balance. Is the wine fruity enough to take a heavy dose of tannin sufficient to store it for long enough to allow the fruit and the acid to evolve to equilibrium? That’s a wine you can age - and it sounds very much like a good quality claret to me!
Last night I went along to the inaugural meeting of ‘Wines, Vines and Good Times’. Rubbish name, but a very nice lady called Ruth setting up a wine appreciation club in Balham, London.
Last night was just an introduction - so all the wines were on the house - and Ruth had chosen sparkling wines as the introductory topic. Maybe the thinking was that everybody is supposed to like champagne and sparkling wine - it’s never been my favourite, but you can still explore the extraordinary difference in the appearance, smell and taste of apparently similar wines.
Ruth really seems to know her stuff, which I love. I find my wine knowledge is restricted to France, and to Tuscany & Umbria. Have a look at where The Chain Gang operates our bike tours and it will be pretty obvious why. Get me on dessert wines from Monbazillac or the Coteaux du Layon, or the clarets of the 1855 classification, and I’m as happy as a pig in shit.
But, the minute we start talking about South Africa, New Zealand, Chile or the US, and I’m afraid to say I haven’t got a clue. Literally. I know absolutely nothing about them - except that the most southerly vineyard in the world is in New Zealand.
Not terribly useful information, but it is true. So I do enjoy the old blah blah blah about cepage, ageing, blending and single vintage sparkling wines when they relate to all of these ‘New World’ wines. I’m always a bit in awe that anybody can know France, and French wines, and then know all the others as well. But unless she’s a bloody good actress Ruth knew her stuff and it was fascinating.
The last wine of the evening was a vintage champagne from 2001. We tasted it alongside a blend from the same champagne house made to their house style using wines from various years, like most champagne is. The rule is a vintage champagne uses grapes from the same year.
Most champagnes blend from several years to maintain a consistent house style. Not the cheap champagnes (as if such a thing existed!), but all champagnes, including renowned names like Moet & Chandon & Veuve Clicquot. If a champagne bottle has a year printed on the label, it’s a vintage, from a single year.
This doesn’t mean it’s better, although it probably means it’s more distinctive, more interesting. The winemaker, or vigneron, will make decisions about the ‘cepage’, the combination of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, the three grape varieties allowed in Champagne.
They’ll make decisions about the length of time in the barrel, how long the wine will spend on the lies, how much sugar to add. The most interesting thing about last night’s vintage champagne is that it was from 2001. A rubbish year, when very few champagne houses bothered with a ‘vintage’ so you already have a clue that the winemaker thought they’d done extremely well with their grapes that year.
And it was delicious. Tasting the vintage and the non-vintage side-by-side, the non-vintage tasted lovely, but after tasting the vintage, the non-vintage just seemed to disappear. You always find this when you’re tasting, you have to be careful about the order. A delicious, but subtle wine will seem pallid, odourless and tasteless if you taste it immediately after an over-powering wine.
Anyway, enough of all that. Ruth is planning one event a month, and the next event, on March 13th, is on the subject of Chardonnay. There was a bit of a reaction to the ubiquity of Chardonnay in the late ‘90s, people would chuckle over the mnemonic ‘ABC’, Anything But Chardonnay. It was always unfair.
These same people never realised that the very best champagnes, the ‘blanc de blanc’ (which means white juice from white grapes only, which is a shorthand for 100% Chardonnay) are made from Chardonnay, and the most amazing white wines in the world, the wines from Meursault, Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet, are also 100% Chardonnay.
So I hope our exploration of Chardonnay is an interesting one, and if anyone is likely to be in Balham, south west London, on March 13th 2008, let’s meet up at Ruth’s ‘Wines, Vines and Good Times’, even if it has got a dodgy name.
See you at Café Melié on Bedford Hill, Thursday 13th March, 8.00pm. Probably not too many of our American, Canadian and Australian friends, but you’ll be welcome in spirit.
