Thomas Cottrell is Bellevue Club’s contributing wine columnist and the owner of La Cantina Wine Merchants.
I had a fascinating wine experience the other night, one of those moments of illumination that I love to share with folks. It doesn’t sound like much: I opened up an old bottle of wine. But it definitely got me to thinking. Part of the surprise was the wine, a 1982 Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon. It wasn’t a reserve or special bottling, it wasn’t even a particularly good year (one vintage chart I consulted showed it a bit above
average as a year; the other showed
it slightly below; both said it was a risk for being too old). I’m not even sure why I saved it, or why I saved it for so long. But it certainly tasted good. Silky smooth, with a supple, elegant finish, it showed a beautiful garnet color at the center of the glass, a hint of brick red at the rim, and gave me sweet plum fruit on the palate laced with a hint of earthiness. By contrast, 22 years ago when I first tasted the wine, it was dark purple in color throughout, a bit rough and ready, tannic in the finish, but full of berry fruit in the mouth. It just wasn’t all that pleasant to drink at the time.
The change that comes to any wine with a quarter century of aging is noticeable, but I often find that it surprises folks. I’ve lost track of the number of customers who’ve come to me over the years with a fine wine I’ve sold them 10 or 15 years earlier, asking me, “Tom, is it supposed to taste like this?” Most of the time the wine is lovely, but it’s not what they remember tasting when they first bought it those many years ago. I’ve more or less concluded that most folks who cellar wine think that the wines they lay down will turn
out to be just like the wine they enjoyed so much when it was young, only more so. I think they expected their wine to be better, smoothed out and easier to drink, but not really changed. The evolution that time inevitably brings surprised them mightily. The difference in perception is understandable. Most wine enthusiasts get very few chances to taste older wines. They’re hard to find and usually pretty expensive. By contrast, when I started learning about wine so many years ago, the best-known fine red wine in the world wasn’t California Cabernet or Washington Syrah but red Bordeaux. And drinking young red Bordeaux was not only unthinkable—the wines took years to come around—
it was hard to do. Shops and restaurants would only offer bottles with
a few years of age on them; the young wines would only be sold
for cellaring.
So I started with older wines,
developing a taste for the style, an appreciation that’s never left me. Folks who learned about wine in later years, when ripe, fruity California wines dominated the scene, never had the opportunity to taste well-aged wine, let alone develop an appreciation for their flavors and scents. And now that even Bordeaux has changed its style to produce earlier-drinking wines, it’s harder than ever to acquire the older ones to see what they taste like. So what does this all mean to you? One answer might be to never hang on to a bottle of red wine for more than five years—just to be safe. Another approach would be to spend the money and try a bottle that’s 15 or 20 years old to see whether or not you like such wines. With their earthier, leafier set of flavors and less obvious fruitiness you may not. If you don’t, think of all the time and money (and disappointing bottles) you’ll save. If you do enjoy them as much as I do, then you’ll have years of pleasure ahead of you (except for the bottles that don’t age as well as you’d hoped). And there’ll be delicious surprises in your future, like a 25-year-old bottle of Cab that you can’t remember setting aside. But, oh, what a treat when you discover it!
