Time in a Bottle

Can You Tell When a Wine Reaches Its Golden Age?
A Shipboard Experiment

By Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2004; Page W9. pdf version

If you bought two of the world’s greatest red wines, from the same region and the same vintage, from the same merchant at the same time and stored them side-by-side for a dozen years or so, what would you find when you finally pulled the corks? We’ll tell you what we found in a minute, but first let’s explain why we’re asking.
One of the questions our readers ask most often is: When will a wine be at its peak? In most cases — maybe nine out of 10 or more — the answer is simple: today. That’s because the vast majority of wines are meant to be drunk right away — not just simple whites like Pinot Grigio, but many of today’s affordable Zinfandels, Cabernet Sauvignons and so on. That doesn’t mean they’ll go bad tomorrow or six months from now, but they are designed for easy and immediate consumption. Some wines really are built to last, though — not just fine reds such as great Bordeaux, but some whites, such as fine Burgundy and Germany’s better Rieslings, not to mention sweet wines such as Sauternes.

Comfort and Confidence

In our column, we routinely write about young wines, even when we’re talking about wines like Port, because those are the ones you’re most likely to find on shelves. In fact, over the next few weeks we’ll be writing about some impressive wines from recent vintages. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t stop once in a while and come right out and say that there’s nothing quite so satisfying and delicious as a well-aged wine. It’s not just the taste itself, which is more complex, more generous, more filled with nuance. There’s something deeper than that, a sense of comfort and confidence. Young wines seem to shout and make us almost tense up a little, no matter how much we like them; older wines whisper and make us want to exhale.
How can you tell when a fine wine will taste like that? Here’s the truth: It’s impossible to know. Even with some general guidance from vintage charts and such, too much depends on each individual bottle and the bottle’s individual storage conditions to know for sure. If you taste a wine and it’s tight and hard but you like it, you might want to buy some more and lay it down for a while. In time, you’ll make educated guesses when to open the next one and the next. But no one can tell you for sure when it will be at its best. Our general advice is to care less about when the moment is perfect for the wine and more about when the moment is perfect for you.
Our own perfect moment came a few weeks ago. Cruise ships are finally sailing out of New York City again and we’ve always wanted to sail past the Statue of Liberty. So to celebrate the end of summer, we found a good deal on a cruise and set sail with Media and Zoe for five days aboard the Carnival Victory. While we were researching our new book, we learned that Carnival and some other cruise lines, including Royal Caribbean, allow passengers to bring aboard some wine for dinner and charge corkage. Right there on our boarding documents, under “Liquor & Beverage Policy,” Carnival said: “Guests are prohibited from bringing alcoholic beverages on board. However, fine wine or Champagne may be brought on board only during embarkation at the beginning of the cruise. A $10 corkage fee will be charged should you wish to consume this wine in the dining room.”
Even though we knew from our research that Carnival has a very good and reasonably priced wine list on its ships, we figured this was an opportunity to finally drink some of our best old wines. We usually taste wines for this column every night, so we have far too many bottles from our own collection that really need to be consumed. We figured we’d take seven bottles — one for each of the five dinners and two to sip in our cabin (or as backups in event of disasters). We thought it would be most fun to take the same kind of wine, so John spent some time in the wine closet and emerged with seven bottles of Bordeaux: 1970 Phelan Segur; 1988 Latour, Lafite Rothschild and Pichon-Lalande; 1989 Gloria and Pape Clement; and 1990 Chateau Margaux. These are all wines we bought years ago, when prices were more reasonable. We never intended to keep them this long — if we’d gotten around to it, we would have drunk the Phelan Segur years ago — but you know how it is.
Dottie packed the wine into our suitcases. She has done this for years, and has never lost a bottle. Obviously, having these old wines bounced around by baggage handlers just before consumption is not an ideal situation, but we didn’t let the pursuit of the perfect be the enemy of the good, and having these wines on the ship was definitely the good.

Earthy Tastes

The cruise staff never even blinked when we showed up with our own wine at dinner, even though the corks were hard to pull in every case. The Margaux, which we had first, was fabulous — rich with fruit and black earth, some herbs and great acids. It was still a bit young. The 1989 Pape Clement was still young, too, but also outstanding. We wrote: “Earthy, vibrant and rich with minerals and fruit. Still youthful. Generous, with a real ease. Satisfying.” The 1988 Pichon-Lalande was a bit too light, though it had nice fruit flavors. The Gloria was disappointing, with some nice fruit, but clearly over the hill.
Then came our back-to-back tasting, the 1988 Latour and the 1988 Lafite. We had the Latour first and it was awesome. The wine was black as night, without a hint of age on the nose or in its appearance. It was filled with great, tight fruit, a wine of breeding. It actually tasted like a really good, young first growth. After 15 minutes — we drank each of these wines over a period of at least two hours — it became sweeter with fruit and softer. Then it became more structured, with prune-like fruit, deep and dark. The wine kept changing — sometimes soft, sometimes more intense, sometimes into “dumb” periods in which it didn’t show much of anything. This was truly one of the best wines we’ve tasted, but, if we had another bottle, we’d try it again in 10 years.
We had the Lafite the next night. Around the time that it was made, some important critics considered the Lafite better than the Latour. Our bottle was in good shape, with a high fill (that’s how high the wine comes into the neck; the higher the better on an old bottle). But when it was poured, it was slightly brown. It was elegant and relaxed, but it lacked structure, backbone. It was too soft and tasted much older than the Latour. “Lovely and elegant, but tired,” we ultimately decided.
Two wines, from different properties, kept side by side all of these years. In the end, the Latour was the best wine of the trip (though not as satisfying at the moment as the Margaux); the Lafite was the second-least favorite, just ahead of the Gloria. You never know. It’s possible that two other bottles of the same wines would taste very different from those right now. Mystery is one of the key elements in the appreciation of wine.

A Sweet Souffle

We saved the 1970 Phelan Segur for the last night. This was a very good year, but this wine was never designed for such a long life. What would we find? There was a little vinegar on the nose — clearly a bad sign. But it mostly blew off after a while, leaving a sweet, very soft, ephemeral taste, “like a souffle of old wine,” as we wrote. It had no body, but was delightful in its own way.
Now, anyone who loves wine will tell you about an experience when an old wine pulls itself together for just a few minutes, then trails off. It’s a very exciting moment. In the case of our Phelan Segur, it happened 45 minutes after our waiter, Alexander, pulled the cork. The wine suddenly perked up, getting an overlay of classy, sweet fruit and even a hint of chocolate. The vinegar had blown off, leaving a nose as pleasant and relaxed as Grandma’s house. A minute later, the vinegar crept back into the nose. Four minutes after that, the wine got watery. It had shown us its best stuff and was ready to be finished.
If you have some older wines, find an excuse this weekend to enjoy one. Or think about buying one sometime this fall, or maybe asking Santa for one. And it’s never too late to start a collection. Pick up a couple of bottles of fine red wine. Don’t obsess about storage. You don’t want to abuse your wine with heat or light, but if you put it someplace dark and undisturbed, with a fairly constant, moderate temperature, it will be fine for a few years (usually the bottom of a closet is fine if it meets those criteria). Older wine tastes great. Older wine that you bought at a reasonable price and cellared yourself tastes even better.