[question] Question submitted by James Heyworth From time to time I read or hear comments like this made about young wines: ‘I left half the bottle on the bench and it tasted great two days later’ or ‘will improve with years in the bottle as it did after hours in the glass’. Is there any relationship between how a wine changes with extended breathing and how it is might age in the cellar? [/question] [answer] Definitely. Wine goes one of two ways with extended breathing. Most wines, which are suited neither to extended breathing nor to cellaring, tend to fall apart fairly quickly. They do this by losing their freshness of fruit, by breaking up from the back of the palate forwards and by revealing unattractive secondary flavours that were initially concealed by their fruit and /or oak. Other wines that are genuinely suited to cellaring will certainly hang in for a day or two, if not indeed actually improve. It doesn’t matter if it’s a more delicate red like a fragrant pinot noir or a more substantial wine like a robust shiraz; the same conditions apply. When first opened, these wines might need significant aeration to assist in the removal of sulphides and in some cases to soak up oxygen if they were made and matured in the anaerobic conditions popular in certain high-tech wineries. Petaluma reds are a perfect example of this. During the first couple of days after opening, some of these better-balanced wines that are genuinely equipped for extended cellaring may reveal a softening of tannin and an opening and broadening of their spectrum of aromas and flavours. Before I recommend that a wine with which I am relatively unfamiliar will cellar for a decent length of time, I will try and monitor its progress over a day or two for these reasons. No matter my initial impressions of the wine, if it can’t handle a day in a recorked but half-empty bottle, I’m significantly more reluctant to recommend it as a serious cellaring prospect. While white wines are less likely to survive in an opened bottle as well as reds (they do not have the phenolic complement of red wines that can protect against oxidation), I have noticed that sometimes mid-aged rieslings and semillons, as well as younger chardonnays, can show similar improvement for a day or so. I’d always keep a half-consumed bottle of white in the fridge, but a more serious test for a red is for it to be kept at (reasonable) room temperature. Mind you, if I were keeping the red wines for simply drinking purposes, they’d be in the fridge as well. [/answer]
