Why Age Wines?

Why Age Wines?

As Howard Jones likes to point out, things can only get better. While that may be true of some things, it isn't always true of wines. 

As a professor of beverage alcohol, I often get asked by my students, "why age a wine?", and "which wines should I age?". These are both excellent questions and although they seem to be asked less and less often, I am still eager to convey the benefits of patience and good cellaring practices. At any given time, I have roughly 600 bottles sleeping in my subterranean wine cellar. It's dark, cool, and damp - all excellent conditions for long-term wine storage. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to pull bottles out of the rack that have rested for a decade or more and are finally ready to be consumed with friends and a good meal. If I time it right, at this point in their lives, the wines have developed plenty of tertiary aromas or "bouquet". These aromas might include dried fruit, cedar wood, tobacco, mushroom, earth, honey, or animal smells. In a perfect world, their acids have rounded, their tannins are velvety and sweet, and there is a sensation of lushness and fullness to the wines. Flavours last much longer on the palate and aromas are much more complex as these tertiary characteristics join the now-integrated secondary "winemaking" and primary "grape and terroir" aromas. A bottle, aged properly, that might have cost $20 or $30, will smell, taste, and feel like a much more expensive wine. 

So which wines to age? Ideally, we are looking for wines with adequate structure and concentration. That is to say, whites with plenty of acid surrounded by lots of extract and complexity. Reds should have ripe, firm tannins plus lots of chewy and dense fruit character. Obviously, prestigious wines from Bordeaux, Barolo, and Brunello are the pinnacle of ageworthy wines, but there are plenty of other, less prestigious and less expensive wines out there that will still enjoy a 5-10 year slumber. 

Take, for example, the Rosso Piceno pictured here from Le Marche, Italy. It's a blend of Montepulciano and Sangiovese and offers a really lovely drinking experience in youth. The problem is, the tannins are quite firm and a little obtrusive and the aromatic complexity is somewhat limited at this point. Imagine a tight fist where each finger has its own unique aroma and flavour. It isn't until the fist loosens that each of the fingers aroma becomes evident. Wines are like that. As they age, their grip loosens and their character becomes more expressive, giving the wine more complexity and ultimately a softer and more pleasurable mouthfeel. Because this Rosso Piceno has such lovely fruit concentration and ripe but plentiful tannins, I know it will become more and more perfumed, mouth-filling, and smooth after 5+ years of aging. It's only $17.95, but it's really well made and it comes from grape varieties that generally guarantee tannin and acidity. The fact that it has such lovely, dense fruit concentration is what makes it such a great candidate for your cellar. 

One final word on aging. It is always better to drink a wine too young than to drink it too old. Don't wait too long because once a wine is aged too long, the fruit dries out and it loses its glorious texture. As a general rule of thumb, most whites will be enjoyable between 5 to 10 years old and most ageworthy reds will be approachable between 10 to 15 years. It's always a good idea to buy a few bottles so you can monitor a wines progress each time to pull another cork.