1998 Sassacaia

[AlpineOeno]

"tight" is a term often used for young wines. It is one of those terms that everyone in the wine world uses, and knows what it means, but if you ask them to describe it, you'll get a hundred different definitions. I personally use it to describe a wine that is not as expressin\ve on the nose and palate as it will be when it reaches its prime. Not to be confused with a simple drinking wine that has only one dimension to offer, but referring to one of only a few wines (about 5% of world production) that is actually ageable and will benefit from more time. THis manifests itself in the wine in one of two general ways.

1. I wine doesn't develop more expressive fruit characteristics, but rather the level of tannin is too high and masking the delicate fruit components. as time goes on, the level of tannin and fruit components in the wine will drop off. The trick is, as a wine matures, the tannin will drop off before the fruit does, so you have a "window" of maturity. In youth, you have high tannin and fruit, but tannin masks all. In maturity, the tannin has diminished revealing the dynamic fruit components. And yes, a wine can be too old, which means that the fruit dies out as well.

2. The second way a wine can manifest itself as being "tight" and too young is more mysterious. I have found this characteristic of many great bordeaux in great years (especially left bank). In this case the wine "shuts down" for a few years. I don't know the scientific reason, but this can be simply described by saying that if you put one of these wines in a glass with a blindfold, you could almost mistake it as water. You open the same wine in 10 years and it will be magical. I found this to be the case with several of the 2000 Bordeaux. We had an amazing time with the 2000 D'Armailhac. I was working with a direct importer during the 2000 releases, and we tried hundreds of the wines. This wine in particular, we tried periodically over a 36 hour period and it never did develop any nose or expression on the palate. This is typical of this wine, and will tell a different story with age.

I hope this very long winded tangent helps a little.