Aging Wine Part III: Case Closed

Any regular readers of this column know that my wife, Emily, is pregnant with our first child. Upon hearing this news in June, I promptly began preparing to lay down a case of wine to enjoy with my unborn son 25 years down the road. Two months ago, I wrote about the process of aging wine – how to select it, where to store it, when to drink it, and so forth. Last month I delved into the all-important question of which wines are worth aging by cataloguing five of the wine categories that made their way into the mixed case I put together. This column finishes that project by reporting on the four remaining categories of wine I’ve chosen for my son’s case. In so doing, hopefully I’ll lend some help to others who are searching for wines to put away for a special occasion.

It’s essential to emphasize, as I have before, that the wines that follow are by no means the only ones worth aging. Lots of wines that will improve for 25 years and beyond – including Barolo, Tokaji, Madeira, and some California Cabernet – don’t appear in these columns due to limited time and resources. If I tried to explore every age-worthy wine out there, I would be the happiest homeless man you’ve ever met. With a baby on the way, it seemed wisest to restrict myself to 12 bottles and pay our rent.

Barbaresco
The three greatest – and most age-worthy – Italian wines all start with the letter ‘B’: Brunello di Montalcino (from Tuscany), and Barolo and Barbaresco (both from Piemonte). Among these, the wine that is the most obvious choice for long-term aging is Barolo, which comes from the small region that surrounds the town of the same name in the highlands of northwestern Italy. So I went in search of the perfect Barolo to lay down for a quarter century.

I didn’t find it. I expected that a Barolo from the most recent critically acclaimed vintage – 2001 – would fit the bill. But in talking to folks in the trade who knew Italian wine, I learned that although 2001 was an excellent vintage, it lacked the kind of structure and acidity that forms the backbone of a wine that will improve over a few decades. Some 2001s might still be drinking well in 2030, I was told, but it’s not a sure bet.