Campbell Mattinson answers your pressing wine questions

CAMPBELL MATT IN SON ANSWERS YOUR PRESSING WINE QUESTIONS

Q. Last year, I was diagnosed with aggressive cancer. After surgeries and chemotherapy, the future remains clouded. My palate is now 80 per cent recovered, with nerve damage from chemo to my hands, feet, lips and tip of my tongue. I’ve been collecting wine seriously for about 10 years and would prefer to enjoy my collection rather than leave it as inheritance. However, I’m unsure as to the best way to enhance wines still in their youth. Most of my wines span from 2008 to 2014. I have mainly Penfolds (389, St Henri, RWT and a single

‘12 Grange), several twobottle flights of Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier and many single bottles of $100-plus wines. They’ve all been kept in wine fridges at 15 degrees. Should I turn the temperature up to 18 to hasten development, or decant for an extended period? I’ve often found leftover reds taste better the next day, or am I overthinking this? Should I just open them at random and accept things as they are?

Slavko Stojanovic

A. First, I was impressed by your attitude and then by your collection. You’ve fast developed a fan club around the office here. I don’t think you’re overthinking it, but it seems you’re nailing the solution yourself. All the wines you mention are noteworthy not just for their quality but also their balance, and great well-balanced wines will drink beautifully almost regardless of their age. This isn’t about me, but for the sake of the exercise, when I look back on my most profound wine experiences, there’s more or less an equal split between the wines involved being super young and super old. In other words, wine doesn’t have to be old to be brilliant. If a wine is still at a particularly dense or brooding stage of its life, and in the past you’ve often found these wines have worked better on day two, then I’d absolutely give them a long decant (two to three hours for something like a young Grange, if not longer) prior to consumption. I say this with the proviso that it’s always better to enjoy a wine’s journey as it breathes and unfolds in the glass/decanter, even if at first it still needs more air time, rather than try for the ultimate with the first sip and inadvertently wait too long. As for changing the cellar temperature, it’s smart thinking, but don’t. Wine is bottled hope. No cellar should ever be empty of it.

Q. I’m getting better at ageing wines, but I’ve sometimes chosen a wine I liked young, with a structure that looked ageable, only to find a few years later it was horrible. I’ve often closed the box for longer, in the hope they might improve, which works sometimes, but is only reasonable when you have a whole case. If you’ve bought three bottles, it’s a waste. Is there any way at all of predicting, and not opening, the moody teenager?

Marie Heitz

A. I know where you’re coming from and I go through the same frustrations myself. All wine enthusiasts do. Even more frustrating: sometimes these wines are horrible for good, sometimes they do bounce back or (worse still) sometimes it’s a bottle-bybottle proposition. Indeed, the bottle you just tried may not be representative of the remaining bottles.

Am I messing with your mind? Welcome to my world. In general terms, the ‘teenage’ years are often most troublesome. When wines are released, they’re generally in good drinking shape, but as they move through ‘transition’, from young wine to a wine with more secondary flavours, there’s often an awkward or less impressive stage. Drink it in the first few years, skip the next few, and drink it again for the next few years after that works for a lot of wines. In some ways, though, it’s a bit like asking whether it’s possible to live the perfect life, or never make a mistake. The present isn’t always the best predictor; some wines show all the promise in the world in their youth and then don’t turn out like everyone expected. We get it right most of the time and that’s why we’re here discussing fine wine, but errors occur. Not everything we rave about works out as we thought. I love drinking wine at its peak maturity, but nowadays if I find a young wine I love, even if it has great cellaring potential, I tend to drink it young.

Q. For many years I accepted the amount of sediment deposited by a wine was related to its age. However,

I’ve noticed it’s not always the case; I recently enjoyed a 2014 Barossa grenache that left a surprising amount of sediment in the final glass. Could you explain this phenomenon and demystify the correlation between age, vintage, variety and terroir?

Stephen Thornton

A. Sediment, which isn’t a fault and often a good sign, is most common in wines that either have been aged, as you’ve noticed, or are intended to age. You’d almost never see it in a wine intended to be consumed young or youngish. It’s more common in

(but certainly not exclusive to) wines that haven’t been fined or filtered. The older the wine, the more likely it is to have formed (or fallen out of the wine) but there’s no issue with it forming in a young or young-ish wine; it just means the winemaker subscribes to the view that leaving various artefacts in the wine adds to its texture and/or flavour.