The myth goes as follows. A venerable wine (most probably a red Bordeaux, and likely from the Left Bank) is brought up from the cellar, with all due reverence. It has been lying there undisturbed for decades, accruing dust, shedding tannins, mellowing into maturity, dreaming who knows what dreams.
The bottle is opened, with infinite care, probably using several different corkscrews, decanted, following the full quasi-religious ritual involving the candle below the neck, poured into appropriate stemware – and lo and behold! Something miraculous is experienced. Here is a wine which more than compensates for its loss of youthful vigour with infinite complexity and what James Suckling would call profundity. Even a kind of wisdom.
Come to think of it, this myth is related to the Hollywood action movie cliché of the twinkly-eyed CIA veteran, usually played by Morgan Freeman, returning to the field after retirement, perhaps making model boats in Baja California, and outperforming all the young operatives.
The wine version of the myth is not entirely a myth. I have experienced it a few times. There was the 1959 Lafite which my father opened to celebrate my (almost) 50th birthday, bought for around £2 in the early 1960s, and when opened (with considerable trepidation) quite magnificently full and complete, with a bouquet like a Turner sunset. We were also lucky with bottles of Haut Brion and Haut Bailly 1964 (a wonderful vintage in what was then the Graves), 1961 and 1966 Palmer, 1967 Pétrus (by far the best wine of the vintage) and a few others. These really were transcendent wines. As it happened none of them had cost more than a few pounds to buy; all had been impeccably cellared and not moved for decades.
More and more, however, I feel such epiphanies are the exception, not the rule. I recently invited my oldest wine buddy round to taste (and drink) some older red Bordeaux from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, from his cellar and mine: it was a disappointing, not to say sobering, experience. Ageing had not improved these wines, or to put it more politely they had gone way beyond optimum maturity. They had all the charm of a crusty old bigot hardened in opinions which had not been especially palatable in the first place. Twinkly-eyed, sprightly Morgan Freemans they were not.
The debate about how long to age wines is not new, rages quite fiercely and has extremists on both sides. I remember a seminar where Jamie Goode questioned whether ageing improved wines at all. At the other extreme a collector quoted in a recent article by Jancis Robinson claimed that 90% of wines were drunk too young.
As you may have gathered I am not an extremist on these matters. I’ve regretted drinking wines too young – had that tantalising experience where the last glass of a wine is by far the best – but also, and perhaps more bitterly, regretted keeping them too long.
But I also note that the debate about the ageability of wines tends to focus almost exclusively on red wines. Very few people seem to discuss the ageability of white wines – an equally interesting and important topic.
There are a number of reasons for this. Some are simple prejudices, connected with the fact that the colours of older white wines may not be as appealing as the rich garnet hues of mature red wine. Some are to do with secondary markets, investment and status. Secondary markets in wine are heavily biased towards red wines. Investors in wine (I retain an old-fashioned, quasi-Marxist abhorrence for this practice) overwhelmingly favour red wines. Mature red wines seem to project status in a way that mature whites – except perhaps for one or two Burgundy Grands Crus and top Champagne prestige cuvées or single vineyard wines – do not. Another factor may be the unfortunate phenomenon of “premox” or premature oxidation which began to afflict white Burgundy in the 1990s. Wines just a few years old, from top producers, which should have been in the their youthful prime, or not even ready for drinking, were found to be browning, tired and nutty.
But how logical is this? The wines which age the longest and with the most reliability – fine German and Alsace Riesling and Madeira – are made from white grapes. Champagne is something of an anomaly here as a white wine made predominantly from red grapes, but still the longevity of great Champagne is under-appreciated. When I worked for Christie’s Wine Department and a consignment of older vintage Champagne came up for sale, we contacted precisely two collectors, one a prominent Labour politician, the other an immensely wealthy property developer.
White wines – leaving Champagne out of it for the moment – age in a somewhat different way from reds. Having had minimal contact with the skins – we will leave orange wines out of the equation – they do not have significant tannins or anthocyanins to shed or resolve. The key factor is acidity. Sweetness also helps to conserve wines. Of course both red and white wines are affected by oxidation as they age.
These chemical differences affect the feel or modality of the ageing of white wines. Whites age more subtly, less dramatically than reds. My experience with sweeter German Rieslings, especially from the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, is that they can remain on the same plateau for decades. In the case of the finest Madeira this plateau may last centuries.
It is not just these champions of longevity among white wines which age gloriously. Top producers of Albariño wines from the Rías Baixas are gradually getting the message across that wines from this variety improve for at least ten years.
Is there a message here for human ageing? Should we aim not for the frankly impossible Morgan Freeman trick of retaining youthful potency in old age but rather for an almost imperceptible sliding into grace? Time will tell.
Photo by Valentin Balan on Unsplash