How Long to Age Wine? How Does Anyone Know?

I've always been amused by the comments that I often see, typically toward the end of wine review: drink between [for example] 2024 and 2030. How do they know?

The short answer is that they don't, but their guess is way more educated and usually way more accurate than yours and mine. They have data. Thay have experience. You and I likely have less of both of those things.

I always wanted to find a way to weave my day job into this blog, but I don't think I found that avenue in my first year. Today seems to be the day. In my day job, I'm an actuary. As an actuary, I evaluate things like contingent risks. That is, I evaluate the potential outcomes of future evebts that depend on a whole bunch of stuff that could happen. In order to know which potential outcomes are more likely as compared to less likely or not at all likely, I need to make assumptions as to what will happen. When I do this, I do it based on available data as well as my experience, training, and education. 

Determining when a wine will peak is actually a similar process. As we learned months ago, there are a number of factors that can significanly affect the ageworthiness of a wine. Among them are tannins, acidity, and alcohol content. These are frankly the basic elements, but there is obviously a lot more. Not all acidity is identical. Not all tannins are alike. And, the alcohol content of a particular wine tends not to vary significantly from one year to the next yet the ageworthiness of a wine from one vintage to the next might vary very significantly. 

So, how do they get it right? I return to that actuarial stuff. They make assumptions, based on data, experience, training, and experience.

And, sometimes they don't get it right.

I've used this example before, but I think it's one of the best. Let's compare the 1997 and 1998 vintages of Napa Cabernet. And, to see how my thoughts are, I compared it to Wine Spectator's "Vintage Chart." To this day, I think they got this one wrong, but they haven't updated it for my experiences.

To use their words, the 1997 vintage was "[h]uge crop of ripe, opulent, fleshy, concentrated wines, from near-perfect weather; super in Sonoma, too." They say to drink now. Well, my experience was not the same. When young, the 1997 vintage was spectacular. It seemingly deserved the 99 points that they awarded it. And, then something happened and it was something that I can't explain, but the 97s peaked and they peaked early. The vintage of the century had a specactular, albeit short in my opinion, career. To use a sports analogy, it signed a big free agent contract and then rested on its laurels.

The 1998 vintage, again, form the Wine Specator Vintage Charts was awarded a really shabby 84 points. Typically speaking, that is a vintage to avoid. We've discussed it previously that their was frost shortly before budbreak and the weather was not good around harvest time. Many winemakers panicked and the result was that they picked grapes at seemingly unnatural times producing overly tannic wines with lower than usual alcohol content. They likely deserved the "[c]ool, damp year with mostly green, herbal wines marked by gritty tannins; few memorable bottles." We were told to drink them young and perhaps the better advice was to not drink them at all. Young they were, in a word, dismal.

I saved a few bottles and just recently drank the last one I had. It was not from an unltra high-end winery, but one you would have thought of in 1998 as mundane and fairly low-priced. But, it did benefit from a patient winemaker who was going to do things his way or not at all. 

I had I am pretty sure three bottle initially. I dramk one quickly and it was not good at all. It aligned with the review that I read that gave it something like 82 points and said it best skipped. I opened the second bottle about 5 years later and it was okay. The grit in the tannins had softened, but it was still very mundane and quite tight (not at all expressive). So, I hing on to a bottle. Frankly I forgot about it until recently and then opened it. It was remarkable. It had come into its own. Exciting with a mixture of earth tones and fruit and tannins so soft and rounded. In 2000 or 2001, it probably deserved its 82 points. In 2020, it deserved a good solid 95+.

What happened to the experts? Their actuarial or oenophilic assumptions while often spot on were just flat out wrong this time. 

We all make mistakes sometimes. 

So, the moral of the story is that usually we can trust their thoughts in this regard, but not every time.