Racking up the years

AGEING WINE

Many wine writers and some producers, on their back labels, put dates for what is called a “drinking window”, those few years between which, in their opinion, the wine will be drinking at its best.

Depending on the wine, the window might be a few years or a few decades hence. Of course, for wines such as sauvignon blancs, pinot grigios and lighter, unoaked reds, their bestdrinking time could well be tomorrow, next week or within the next year when the wines still retain their appealing vitality and fresh fruitiness. And it’s a fact that most modern wines are not made for ageing, certainly not prolonged ageing.

But when wine, all wine, goes into bottle it is still evolving and, given time, will go through a process of chemical and molecular reactions that change the way it looks, smells, tastes and feels in the mouth, a process that continues until the moment it is consumed.

After time in bottle, the initial fruit characters become less prominent, the tannins in red wines soften and lose their astringency, acids mellow, a myriad of new flavour and textural characters are formed until all the substances that make up a wine’s character come into a more complex, deeply flavoursome and greater balanced whole.

This complexity gain and fruit loss is a not yet not fully understood process.

But the changes can be quite dramatic. Whites such as semillons and sweet and dry cool-climate rieslings lose their bright, green-tinged colour to become more golden, their racy acidity softens and flavours become deeper, richer and more honeyed, toasty and nutty.

Some, such as the better Lindeman Hunter River semillons and the Leo Buring (Rhine) rieslings of the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s were still drinking superbly at 20 and 30 years of age.

Although reds tend to lose colour as they age, in other respects they have similar flavour and textural changes as whites with some French bordeaux from great vintages living and drinking superbly for 50 years and more.

However, not all of them, and the longer they’re left in the cellar the more different two bottles of the same wine are likely to become.

One of the most dramatic changes I’ve seen in any wine was Claude Radenti’s 1996 Freycinet pinot noir, the product of one of Tasmania’s worst vintage years ever — and no better for Freycinet than it was for anyone else in the state.

Had you tasted the wine on release in 1998, or in 2000, you’d most likely have asked for your money back. Had you followed its show results in those early years, you certainly wouldn’t have rushed to tuck a dozen away in the cellar. And yet when tasted 14 years later, it was a glorious wine — not just good, but a knock out.

Judging whether a wine will age well, whether it’s worth putting it away for five, 10, 15 years or so to see it develop and provide maximum drinking enjoyment, is always a punt. The level of acid and, in reds, the tannins are a guide, as are the grape variety, the style of wine, the vintage and the track record of previous vintages of the wine itself.

But those published drinking windows are little more than informed guesstimates. And, of course, best guesses are very different if the wine is to be stored in an underground cellar in Tasmania or in a kitchen cupboard in Darwin.

“And yet when tasted 14 years later, it was a glorious wine … a knock out