Vintages Many Years Later

It's a pet peeve of mine that many restaurants will show wines on a wine list and include vintages, but then substitute other vintages and not say a word about it. Of course, you might be asking who cares? I do. And, I'm going to endeavor to show you why.

Before going into that, let's suppose that I order a 2014 Brunello di Montalcino  from a particular winery and our server instead brings out a bottle of the 2015 vintage of the same wine. If our server informs me, frankly, I am going to be thrilled. There has been full disclosure and I am getting what, generally speaking, is an upgrade. On the other hand, if I ordered a bottle of a 2016 "Left Bank" Bordeaux and was presented a bottle of the 2017 vintage from the same estate, I would likely not accept it. We are talking about the difference between a monumentally great vintage and one marked by frost early in the growing season. One had the potential to produce great wine while in the other, winemakers struggled to produce drinkable wines.

How do you know? Understand, I am not talking about how I know. I remember stuff that matters to me. Sometimes even better than I would like. You might not. So, how do you know?

Well, there is Google. You can check out vintage charts to get a decent idea. You can ask your server who will probably not know. You can hope for the best.

It can be really bad when you have a restaurant that has the guts to have a great wine list and does show vintages, but has servers that don't understand. Several years ago, where several might be a bigger number than I recall, I saw a bottle on a wine list that was a particularly great vintage of a wine that had not yet achieved the notoriety that it has since gotten. It was quite inexpensive (enough so that people who don't like to spend money on wine at dinner, but do like to drink it would not have been phased) and this particular vintage had been rated 95 points or more by virtually everybody. In today's dollars and wine prices, this red wine would be on a wine list for likely closer to $45 for a bottle than $40. The problem was that the next year's vintage was the one since then that the winery and or winemaker really blew it. And, the server brought us that next vintage. 

Well, I knew about the next vintage and remarked that that was not the wine they had on their list and therefore not the wine that I had ordered. The server argued with me and told me it did not matter. After calling over a manager, the situation was rectifed fairly well. And, while this might bother some of you, I did not tip this server well. 

So, is there really a difference? Yes there is. 

Yesterday was Father's Day and we ate at home and had steak for dinner. With it, I chose a 2005 from a winery and vineyard known for producing ageworthy Cabernet from Napa Valley. What you would need to know is that the 2005 growing season was wonderful. It produced huge, frequently record volume crops in Napa Valley. The wines were approachable young and tended to be soft and elegant although this wine often described as brooding could have been different. As it turned out, the flavor of this wine was excellent, but it was a good thing we drank it now and didn't wait another year or two. It was probably at the end of its peak.

About a month ago, we drank a Cabernet from very nearby that same vineyard. Known to have similar characteristics generally, this one was a 2004. The 2004 vintage produced much smaller yields there and the Cabernets when young tended to be tightly wound. This wine was really in the middle of full stride. While I have no regrets about when we opened it, it easily had another 10, perhaps 15 years left on before it started to decline.

One year's difference. It matters; it really does.