Firstly, a wine has to have fruit in its youth, even if it’s very delicate and restrained. Fruit should be present along the entire length of the palate. The key wine preservative is acid, which you notice down the sides of your tongue. Acid punctuates the finish of the taste, just as a full stop completes a sentence. Acid contributes to the life and freshness of many wines and without it, a wine’s palate will lack length and freshness after a year or two. Acid and fruit are essential, even for sweet dessert wines as sauternes and auslesen, each being classic cellaring whites. Tannin is obviously a factor in the ageability 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. The 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 new generation of high-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. As they age, these wines become more and more out of balance. 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.
