Aging Wine: A Guide to Laying Down Wine for Your Child (or Any Other Reason)

On a warm Tuesday in June, my wife Emily gently told me she thought she might be pregnant with our first child. We hadn’t planned this, and I was having trouble adjusting to the idea. The next evening I was eating Chinese food, and when I opened the fortune cookie, I decided to interpret the fortune in light of whether Emily was pregnant. The little slip of white paper read, “Teamwork wields excellent results.” Nothing could have been clearer (assuming, as I did, that the fortune meant to say “yields”), and I resigned myself to my fate. Sure enough, the following day the first pregnancy test was positive. As was the second. And the third. But by then I was excited, and now we wouldn’t have it any other way.

What’s all this to do with wine? Simple – for wine enthusiasts, one of the great advantages of expecting a child is that you have a bona fide excuse to buy a case of really good wine to lay down for 20+ years. What’s more, for trigger-happy, instant-gratification types like me, the intention of giving the wine to my child when he or she attains drinking age, and the possibility of enjoying it with him or her 25 years down the road, provide a powerful incentive against succumbing to the temptation to dip into the stash early, which too often happens with other wine I’m trying to age. And if self-policing doesn’t work, my wife’s always around to lay down the law (“Hands off the baby’s wine!”).

But laying down wine for a couple of decades is not all peaches and cream. Many concerns arise (what kind of wine should I buy? from what year? how do I know it’ll be good in 20 years? how should it be stored? how much will this cost?), and often by the time an expectant parent wades through all the issues, it becomes apparent that while the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. I’m a serious wine geek and quite committed to the idea of picking the perfect case of wine for my son or daughter, but even so, I fatigue just thinking about the task of finishing off my half-filled case.