Non-vintage wines worth a try

Different years’ grapes can still blend winningly

WORLD OF WINE

One of today’s wines (the provocatively named Kitchen Sink Red) shows no vintage date indicating the year the grapes were harvested. Usually, that’s referred to as a non-vintage wine, although you might also think of it as multi-vintage, because the wine is a blend of wines from different vintages. This particular wine is also a blend of grape varieties — although a more careful blend than “kitchen sink” implies — and they’re listed on the back label.

Blending grape varieties is common, and some of the most prestigious wines (such as wines from Champagne, Bordeaux and Chianti) are blends. But blending wines from different vintages is less common, at least for still table wines. It’s usual for champagne, where the base wine is almost always a vintage blend, although there are vintage-dated Champagnes. And blending years is the rule for sherry, where a “solera” system means that each bottle may contain a little wine from dozens of different vintages.

Most non-vintage table wines are low on the quality spectrum, but an exception (like Kitchen Sink) is Caballo Loco (Crazy Horse), made by the Valdivieso winery in Chile. Each batch of this wine is given a number, not a vintage year, so you buy Caballo Loco 8, 12, 13, and so on.

Starting with the first batch (Caballo Loco 1), half of the production has been held back for blending with the following year’s, so the latest batch has a tiny percentage from the very first.

Most wine laws allow some wine from a different vintage to be added to a wine labelled with a vintage date. In Ontario, VQA regulations allow up to 15 per cent, while rules in some other wine regions allow up to 25 per cent. So your 2012 Niagara Chardonnay could conceivably include 15 per cent from, say, 2011.

But why blend vintages at all, when one of the things about wine is that it can show the conditions wine which the grapes grew? Vintage variation is one of the interesting facets of wine that ties wine to its place and time, and it’s one of the reasons wines of different vintages are usually not blended.

One reason for blending could be economic: blending would help out when a big harvest (perhaps leaving some wine unsold) was followed by a small harvest. But blending can also modify the effects of a vintage.

Acidic and thin wine from a cool, wet year would be improved by the addition of fruitier wine from a warmer year.

The point is not to avoid non-vintage wines because they lack a vintage date on the label. There are very good non-vintage wines on the market, just as there are very mediocre vintagedated wines.