QUESTION: HOW LONG SHOULD A WINE AGE?
There is no clear answer to this. Some people simply don’t like or understand old wine. What is dead to one person is just coming into its prime to another. Some say “if you can taste the fruit in a wine, it isn’t ready for drinking”, others think “if you can’t taste the fruit, the wine is dead”. Old wine can be an acquired taste. If you buy a wine, such as Chateau Lafite, and you drink it early, you are wasting your money because a wine like that is completely designed to be at its best when it is several decades old. However, most wines don’t age well and should be drunk immediately. The standard reference book, on which wines can be aged, is “Michael Broadbent Vintage Wine” or his “Pocket Vintage Wine Companion”. A nice cellar should include wines that are ageing and some that are ready for immediate drinking. If you do not have sufficiently good conditions for ageing wine, you should not age it. You can buy aged wines and drink them immediately. - Bartholomew Broadbent, CEO of Broadbent Selections
A very difficult question to answer. It certainly depends on the wine. The first question is whether you have proper wine storage. Do you own a cellar? A wine fridge? Or are you storing wines in the closet, or worse, on top of the refrigerator? Without proper storage, there is no reason to age a wine. For those with proper storage, this is an area to consult an expert. Talk to people who sell wine. Check out the Web. Sites such as CellarTracker offer a lot of information. Also, there are professional critics such as Robert Parker who are very good at giving drinking windows. Aside from personal experience, there is really no hard and fast answer. - Loren Sonkin is an IntoWine.com Featured Contributor and the Founder/Winemaker at Sonkin Cellars.
To provide diverse, unbiased, and independent advice, Bartholomew and Loren answer all user submitted questions without consulting one another. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they don't. Always interesting though. Have a wine question for them? Submit it via our Contact Us form.
