It’s perfectly true that not all wines are likely to improve with cellaring. In fact, most of the cheaper daily beverage wine sold around the world will only cellar for a relatively short time at best before showing signs of deterioration. Here are some guidelines that might help you decide whether a wine is fit for cellaring, and possibly for how long.
To begin with, not many are aware that certain kinds of white wine can cellar as well as top reds. Many Australian cellars are well represented with semillon from the Hunter Valley or riesling from either the Eden or Clare Valleys, each of which are traditional cellaring styles.
Either way, red or white, a wine must have a few prerequisites to begin with. Fruit flavour should be present along the entire length of the palate. A young white Burgundy, or chardonnay, might reveal very delicate fruit, but if it’s not there at the start, or else overwhelmed by enough wood to build a house, forget about cellaring it. Acid, which you detect down the sides of your tongue is wine’s most important preservative, for reds and whites. It punctuates the finish of the taste, just as a full stop completes a sentence. Without it, a wine’s palate will lack length and freshness after a year or two. This even applies with sweet dessert wines as Sauternes and German auslesen, each of which are also classic cellaring whites. Their big, luscious fruit may make the acid a little harder to find, especially with all that sugar, but look for it around your tongue after you swallow. They show dramatic development after a few years.
Tannin is obviously a factor in the age-ability of red wines, although it doesn’t have to be hard or aggressive. Some of the finest and most elegant claret styles from the red Bordeaux varieties begin their lives with tightly knit, but fine and silky tannins, yet history shows they can cellar for many decades in the right conditions. Similarly, if a wine is made with insufficient fruit but with excessive tannin, by the time its tannin has softened and become more approachable, the wine may have lost its fruit entirely.
A real key factor is balance – how the components of a wine fit together. Young wines with great cellaring futures can be big and awkward, with mountains of fruit, oak and tannin, but even in their youth, no single feature of the should stick out above the others. Many of the higher alcohol wines from the New World and Europe present youthful fruit that may conceal their alcoholic strength and spirity warmness, but as fruit fades over time, alcohol doesn’t. So as they age, these wines become more and more out of balance.
I have three final tips. Firstly, consider a wine’s track record, ie how well its previous vintages have cellared, especially those from good seasons. Only buy wines from good vintages for your cellar, since it’s common for lesser vintages to age more quickly. And if it all gets too hard, there are sources of information available that attempt to take the risk out of this very notion. And since I’m the author of one of them – Oliver’s Wines – I’d better sign off before I get too cheeky!
