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+--- Thread: How long can you store wine? (/thread-16331.html)
- ShaiNess - 06-18-2003
Hi! I was told recently that cheaper wines can only be stored for a short period of time. Only certain wines can be stored for an indefinite period of time and if not age well, then at least stay as good. Is this true? If so, what kind of wines can be stored for a long time?
Thanks for the help! [img]http://www.wines.com/ubb2/smile.gif[/img]
- Brom - 06-18-2003
Quite true.
All wines change with age. All wines eventually go bad from age. The vast majority of wines do not do much more than just get older and die (go bad) with age. Others however change for the good.
This is not true of all wines; this is not true for all ages. Simple and clear, eh?
First, the "vast majority". This does not mean that wines that change for the good are rare. It just means that many more wines not intended to age are produced. Beaujolais nouveau is popularly intended to be drunk within 6 months of release and they make 60 million bottles of it a year.
A lot of wine, huh? That 60 million is less than 10% of all Beaujolais made every year; most of those 650 million bottles are intended to be drunk within a year or two.
That gets us to different ages. Different wines drink best at different ages. Some, say a nice white Bordeaux, drink best within a year. Others, say a top red Bordeaux, will be much less harshly tannic therfore more drinkable at 8 years than it is at two, and from a good year will last 20 years or more.
So will that $8 Cotes de Bordeaux be good for 20 years? 10 years? Nope, these wines drink best 2-4 years old.
Complicated? You betcha. Time for rules of thumb and generalities:
Drink whites younger than reds, 90% of the time within a couple of years.
Darker reds last longer than lighter reds.
Cheaper wines do not last as long as expensive wines.
Dessert wines, white and red, are long lived.
To not only last but to improve, to 'develop' in the bottle, that is to say to become more complex of flavor and aroma (which is to say the wine develops secondary and tertiary flavors), a wine must be big and balanced. What must be balanced is the combination of fruit, tannins, acid.
All but the last are as stated generalities, that is to say not always true.
That's a lot for now. Look and see if you have follow-up questions.
- Brom - 06-18-2003
Look, I'm already wrong. I meant not quite true.
Almost no wine lasts indefinitely.
Not all great wines are very long-lived.
- ShaiNess - 06-19-2003
Thanks for the help Brom! It's both confusing and helpful. [img]http://www.wines.com/ubb2/smile.gif[/img] I know there aren't any clear-cut rules for this stuff. I'm just trying to learn more about them so that I don't waste so much wine and money.
The thing is, I guess you can say I’m a collector at heart. I have a habit of collecting all sorts of random things, and without really realizing it, I’ve started a wine collection. I have all these wines given to me as gifts or I bought during my travels. However, up until recently, I couldn’t really appreciate the taste of wine since I couldn’t stand the taste of alcohol. But for some strange reason, maybe because I’m getting older or from training [img]http://www.wines.com/ubb2/biggrin.gif[/img] , recently, I’ve found myself liking the taste of wine more and more. Granted I haven’t tasted all that much, but the taste is certainly growing on me.
With that background in mind, a friend and I went wine tasting at the Duck Walk Vineyards this weekend in Long Island, NY. I wanted to find more wines to like outside of sweet Rieslings so I figured wine tasting is a good way to do it without getting plastered. I was very surprised to find that I liked most of their wines and the ones I didn’t like, I could at least tolerate. What shocked me even more was that I liked their reds just as much as the whites, and I usually hate reds since I need to chill wines to mask the taste of the alcohol. Needless to say, I ended up bringing home four bottles. I would probably have bought more to store, but then the whole question of how long can you store wines came up. That’s how I ended up here. I don’t want to end up wasting so much wine and money because I was an idiot and didn’t know any better. So any other advice for the novice you can give me would be greatly appreciated.
Actually, if you don’t mind helping me and doing a bit of research, could you check the vineyard’s website and check out the wines I bought? Let me know how long YOU would store them. The site is www.duckwalk.com and the wines I bought are:
SOUTHAMPTON WHITE
APHRODITE
BOYSONBERRY DESERT WINE
BLUEBERRY PORT
Again, thanks for all your help!
- Thomas - 06-19-2003
The Duck Walk "wines" you bought are on the sweet side. (I put the word wines in parenthesis because, although I am unsure of what the white and the Aphrodite are produced from, I know that the boysonberry and blueberry products are not technically wine, but that is a whole other subject you can find by searching a few of the past entries on this board).
I suspect it is the sweetness of the products you bought that helps you overcome the aversion to the alcohol taste to which you refer, although alcohol is not so much a taste as it is a sensation (heat).
But to your main point: one way to look at the subject of holding wine is to decide how much you will consume in a certain period of time, say one month, and then buy enough to last that long. Nothing you buy, unless it is quite old to begin with, is going to be a problem for you in that time frame.
Collecting wine is an expensive habit for those who know what to collect, how to store it, and for how long. For those who do not know those things, collecting wine is not only expensive, it is usually wasteful.
- Brom - 06-19-2003
I didn't look them up, but I do not feel i am going out on a limb to advise you to drink these wines this summer.
Almost certainly in proper storage conditions - cool and dark - nothing untoward would happen to these wines over a year. Just as almost certain is that these wines are 'designed and built' to be consumed young and fresh.
You are generally safe keeping any wine up to 12 months.
Go ahead and keep the blueberry port for the winter holidays if you want.
Foodie, I am again surprised by your exclusionary attitude: "I know that the boysonberry and blueberry products are not technically wine"
Why "technically" what is wine then? I am under the impression that wine is the fermented juice of fruits such as grapes, cherries boysenberries etc.
Technically speaking, the technique is identical for any of the fruits.
- Thomas - 06-19-2003
Brom, this subject has been covered but I will say it again:
The grape is the only fruit that, when ripe, produces the proper level of sugar and natural living yeast cells on the skins to ferment to 12 % alcohol, without human intervention. No other fruit can make that claim--all the others need human intervention to reach 12%; the intervention is mainly related to sugar additions, which many wine regions do not allow. 12% is the average (or is it the mean? I never get that straight.) alcohol level of wine. That is what I mean by "technically."
In addition, the word, wine, has Semitic roots (Phoenecia) that applies strictly and soley to the fermentation of grapes.
When I make a technical comment, or have an opinion about wine, I do it from information available to me. I am not exclusionary. I seek to educate and to dispel common myths surrounding wine.
[This message has been edited by foodie (edited 06-19-2003).]
- ShortWiner - 06-19-2003
Foodie, "mean" and "average" usually the same, but "mean" is more precise. Mean=taking all the values, adding them together, and dividing by the number of values. Average is usually used to describe the same process, but (if we were statisticians) could refer to one of the other measures of "central tendancy". I.e., "median" (the value in the middle of a list of ordered values) or "mode" (the most frequently occuring value).
I think "average" works just fine in your post. Please excuse the geekiness--I enjoyed digging up memories of my statistics course.
- Thomas - 06-19-2003
And now I am even more confused...but I do remember something about median--it's on a highway isn't it?
- ShaiNess - 06-19-2003
Ehehehe you guys are funny. Figures...you're from NY as well. Quirkie minds we all have.
ANYWAY, thanks for all the input you guys. I guess I should just start trying to drink some of the wines I have sitting around. As far as the collecting is a wasteful habit thing...I can't help myself. I see a bottle I like, I buy it. Thankfully it usually only happens when I'm traveling. I suppose I really should try drinking them though.
Foodie, you're right, the primary reason I have always stuck with sweet wines/desert wines is because it masks the alcohol taste. I'm so sensitive to it that I usually can't drink wine with my food since I find the food takes any of the "wine" taste and just amplifies the "alcohol" taste in my mouth. I'm getting better at ignoring it though.
Now here's a question...On one of the other posts that I read, it said to know how long you can store wine, you should really know your vineyard. With that in mind, I decided to call up the vineyard and ask them myself. They told me that the whites can be stored from 3-5 yrs and the reds indefinitely. Would they steer me wrong? It is the reputation of their wine that would be affected.
- JagFarlane - 06-19-2003
Eh heh...yea I'd be the first to say they really steered you wrong on that. Now, I'm in now way an expert...but if memory serves me right...esp on the reds, they cannot be stored indefinatly. As has been posted before, and yes I learned it from this board, as well as reading, most is meant to be drank within a year or so...but ummm some reds can be stored for years, yes, but not indefinatly.
- ShaiNess - 06-19-2003
Okie! thanks! Guess I should start drinking then. If y'all start seeing weird "happy" posts in here from me within the next couple of weeks...then assume that I've started "sampling" my wine. [img]http://www.wines.com/ubb2/wink.gif[/img]
I should just throw a wine tasting party. [img]http://www.wines.com/ubb2/biggrin.gif[/img]
- JagFarlane - 06-19-2003
Woooo the party sounds good...have everyone chip in and bring a different bottle an have fun!
- Thomas - 06-19-2003
Some wineries simply have ill-informed people answering questions, as the one who told you in a blanket statement to store reds indefinitely...