[question] Question submitted by TS Chung. When you rate a wine, say 93 points, and you think it should be cellared at least 5 years, I assume it will taste better then. So its taste will change but not its rating. Thus its rating is not an indication of its taste at a single point in time but over its life. A rating could be thought of as a curved line on a chart of taste over time. So a lower rated wine that has reached its optimum age could taste just as good as the above 93-pointer today? [/question] [answer] Spot on. That’s the way I rate wine. This is of course quite contrary to the wine show system in Australia in which a wine is judged on its performance on the day. I don’t believe that a wine really changes in quality over its life, until its decline, of course. Until then, it’s the same wine. My job, as I perceive it, is to rate wine for its quality, and also to determine when its quality peak will occur. I think the two pieces of information/opinion are useless without the other. This means, of course, that I will be rating young wines very highly that I would not care to drink in the short to medium term. And, as you suggest, if you are looking for something to drink today, a lesser wine at its peak might offer as much pleasure as a better wine still very much on the way up. But, just to throw an honest spanner in the works, most of the truly great wines taste absolutely delicious when really young and years away from their peak, which is the main reason why it’s so hard to find truly great wine drinking at its apogee. [/answer]
