Aging Wines: Which Age Well

First-time wine cellar owners often dream of being able to select wines from their collections for decades to come. Unfortunately, unless you are buying delicate, heavy bodied wines from Old World vintners, you may find that your favorite wine may only be drinkable for a very short time.

Tony Leventhal, manager and cellar master of Vintage Wine Warehouse in Queens, New York, notes that most table wines today are New World wines. These are wines that are pressed and bottled in the US and include some wines from Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and South America. They are usually inexpensive and are meant to be drunk young. “In the old days, you sat on them forever,” he says. “If you are going to be drinking wine under $20, you’ve got to drink it within a couple of years, give or take what it says on the label.”

John Rittmaster, a wine consultant at Prima Vini Wines in Walnut Creek, CA, agrees. “The statistic we use in the industry is that close to 90% of all wine purchased in the United States is consumed within 48 hours of the purchase.” This is a factor that depends less on the grape variety and more on market demand. “Given our proclivity towards immediate gratification, our domestic wine industry has geared its production towards making wines that can be consumed immediately and require no cellar time to taste good.”