Is it time to puncture wine's most sacred myths? Oliver Styles thinks so.
We need to stop cellaring wines
For a start it's in the name: "mature wine". As if all other wines drunk and enjoyed by the rest of humanity (and a few other cogent life-forms) are immature. How exclusionary.
As if the wines that don’t "keep" in the cellar are inferior or will not have ever hit those highs enjoyed by the mob of in-bond purchasers, speculators and the generally lazy. It's as if all us wine consumers, the people who just want to enjoy a nice, fresh glass of fruit-forward wine are criminals.
Seriously, how many decades have the people been sneering at those young wines with pure fruit flavors, unsullied, uncorrupted by age? What's wrong with enjoying a primary-fruit-flavored wine – wine as it really should be? The Romans transported wine and used olive oil as a stopper – no aeration there. And there’s no way anyone "aged" wine back in the day, is there? If they did it was by accident – someone just forgot about it. No, cellaring wine is innate snobbery. And it should be resisted.
Infuriatingly too, it's not properly codified. Sommeliers stand at the ready on social media to vintage-shame people who flex by posting pictures of opened 2000s Grand Cru Burgundy and there's something of an accepted timeframe for when wines are "drinking well" (while, again, the rest of us drink poorly…?). There's a step up too, like a hardcore, in which people drink wines of the early half of the 20th Century. But there are no straightforward rules about it. Some people think Bordeaux can be drunk a bit sooner now. Some people test their wines to see….well to see how the wine is progressing, which just illustrates the sheer pleasure-sapping nature of the endeavor.
People draw up timeframes and give suggestions for how long wines should be cellared but there are no rules and certainly no precision around it. It’s almost as if the category is meaningless. After all, most of these wines we plebs don’t understand (of course). But, if we’re honest, they all taste the same anyway.
Enabling the fraudsters
There's none of that lovely, fresh primary fruit – the fruit of the grape, right? No, it's all about notes of leather and tobacco and sous-bois which, surely, is really a French term for erectile disfunction. How did it get to this? Have you tasted 50 year-old Burgundy? It's all watery mushrooms. These people need a lobotomy, not a retirement plan.
No wonder Rudi Kurniawan got away with it – he just had to get a few wines from the nearest couple of decades to the unicorn he wanted and hey presto: no-one could tell the difference. Because of course they couldn't. They just sat around a creaking table and genuflected and it didn't really matter what it tasted like because you weren't being sold a wine. You were being sold history, cedar box and "a surprising vibrancy and freshness for its age". People got seduced.
Because there's a dogma at work here too – an ideology. "This wine will age well," they say, as if aging is the point, not the actual pleasure of drinking it. It's like the landed gentry hanging a shot pheasant for a week. Or an investment. If you're rich enough not to have to drink it straightaway, you are entitled to greater riches (or pleasures, apparently) the longer you hold off. Ideologically, a lot of investment and the accruing of wealth is tied up in this reward-for-non-immediate-indulgence. Deny yourself and you shall be ever richer. Cellaring shouldn't be called the "rewards of patience" but the rewards of abstinence. It’s basically a mild form of middle-aged chastity play.
Because it's a generational thing too, isn't it? All those boomers with their cork collections, their inane Right Bank vs. Left Bank arguments that never end, their endless talk of the weather during harvest in 1959… It's so exclusionary. What about us people that just like normal wines that taste of clean fruit?
And the boomers don't really enjoy it. At least, not as a wine. They like the (hi)story, the "pedigree" of a certain producer or the associations drinking a certain vintage forms in the brain, but they're not really tasting it as a wine. They don't really know what they're talking about. How did this generation get fooled into thinking these were the "right" or proper flavors for wine? Maybe it's because the wines are as old as they are. After all, they grew up with all sorts of hippy nonsense about decanting – who in their right mind would be oxidizing wine? After all it's been through? They might as well put it in a blender. Aging wine? You might as well put it in a slow cooker overnight.
And yes, I know they're not all like that. There are some older Bordeaux vintages that are really interesting wines; wines that make you stop and think. But most of them are so old there's not much interest there and it seems a shame that so much potentially great fruit has been squandered by letting the wine go downhill in a controlled environment. Why, oh why, would someone do that? It reminds me of another category of wines I can't quite put my finger on at the moment.
June 14, 2021 at 05:07AM
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Time to Stop Cellaring Wine | Wine-Searcher News & Features - Wine-Searcher
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