Fruits of ageing fine wines
nin base, and then the fruit can deliver things like beautiful aromas, or the decorations.
The skill of the winemaker is making sure all of these things are in balance – something easydrinking for consuming young, or something designed to age for many years and develop even more layers of complexity over time.
Cellaring wine is also a time when size does matter. Wines in large-format bottles like magnums, double magnums (three litres) and even Salmanazar bottles (nine litres) will live a lot longer than standard 750ml bottles.
A cellar also needs to have a reasonably constant temperature and be away from direct sunlight, so a wardrobe, dark cupboard or cool garage are good places to store wines if you want to age them.
How do you learn about wine and which ones to cellar? Taste, taste, taste and taste some more. As one wine writer said to me many years ago, never walk past the opportunity to taste wine, be it at the supermarket, liquor store, winery or even party.
I don’t mean taste by drinking glass after glass of wine – try very small amounts and focus on remembering what you like and what you don’t like. There is no right or wrong answer to flavours of wine you like; we all have different tastebuds, so discovering wines you enjoy is a very personal thing.
I try to attend some of the formal tastings run by Casa del Vino, especially those presented by Jean-Christophe Poizat from Maison Vauron in Auckland. JC, as he affectionately known, comes from a long line of French wine merchants and has a huge knowledge about his home country and the wines produced there.
A couple of weeks ago, I went along to listen to him talk about wines from the southern Rhone region. We then tasted wines made from grape varieties typical of the region – viognier, claritte, marsanne, grenache, syrah and mouvedre – but, as is common in many French wine regions, there were varying blends of these varieties.
One reason I have not been a very regular attendee in recent years is that I just can’t resist buying more wines for our cellar, so the easiest way is to not be tempted in the first place. But at this tasting I remembered why I like them so much – it’s an opportunity to learn and taste wines you probably wouldn’t buy if you hadn’t tried them first.
And yes, a few bottles of the wines we tasted made their way into our cellar. The first because it is an interesting white wine made from grenache blanc, claritte and marsanne. The Clos des Cazaux Vacqueyras blanc ‘‘Clefs d’Or’’ 2016 isn’t a wine we will keep for a long time but is a complex wine that is light, fresh and perfect for drinking within the next three years.
Another highlight of the tasting for me was St Francois Xavier Gigondas 2015. This is a powerful wine that will reward your patience if you tuck some in your cellar for up to 10 years. Both these wines retail for less than $45, so aren’t too expensive to put in the cellar before you drink them at their best.
Because we have been cellaring wine for about 30 years, we have a number of old ones, so when do we drink them? Sometimes we will open something just to try it and see how it is ageing. We have a number of wines I refer to as ‘‘learning wines’’. Some are wines you wouldn’t normally cellar, like sauvignon blanc, but I think you need to try older wines to help work out what will last a long time.
When it comes to the very large bottles, you need an occasion, or maybe you create an occasion, to open them. Last weekend we organised a dinner at Hopgood’s & Co restaurant because we wanted to open a nine-litre bottle of Glover’s Vineyard 1992 pinot noir. Head chef Aaron Ballantyne created a menu to match with this wine and a few other large bottles we decided to open.
Because we had invited winemakers and wine lovers, we also had a table of wines for tasting, including a number of vintages of Neudorf Vineyards Moutere chardonnay. Trying wines that cover a 26-year period from 1996 to 2017, including bottles sealed with corks and screwcaps, gave us the chance to see not only the impact of screwcap closures on the wines but also how our tastes have changed.
As you would expect, some of the wines sealed with a cork were past their best but still very drinkable. In fact, the 1991 Moutere chardonnay was the star of the night – Tim Finn crafted a remarkable wine 26 years ago, and the fact it is still incredibly fresh and vibrant points to the reason Neudorf Vineyards is considered one of New Zealand’s premier winemakers.
And the Glover 1992 pinot noir? It was fresh and vibrant with restrained fruit flavours, and another outstanding Nelson wine that has stood the test of time.