Protecting Your Wine From Yourself

When I first got into the wine business, classified-growth Bordeaux was relatively inexpensive, and I worked for a wine distributor with some of the best available. Kid in the candy store.

What I quickly discovered is that cellaring that Chateau Talbot 1982 had an enemy--Me (there's no "I" in enemy, but there is a "me" hiding behind the "Y" or why). Now, I'm only slightly schizophrenic--I'm okay and so am I--but, the Cellaring Me envisioned sitting on this wine for 20 years (waiting for that special occasion that never comes, see "Open That Bottle Any Night" below). Unfortunately, the Party-Hearty Me would invite some friends over for dinner and after a couple of bottles of more pedestrian wine, PH Me would say something like, "Oh, man, you gotta try this incredible Bordeaux I just bought." Boom, gone.

So, Cellaring Me devised a devilish plan to thwart PH Me. I obtained several wood wine boxes with lids, and I placed the wines to be cellared in those boxes and nailed the lids shut. I then stacked them on top of each other and put wine racks on top of the stack. Tough thing to do to PH Me, but somebody had to step up if I were ever to have a wine cellar.

I still have the same set up, and it still thwarts what little is left of PH Me. Unfortunately, it also means that I have a fair amount of wine I should have drunk by now. I'm just too lazy to unstack those boxes to get to it.

Cellaring wine is an inexact, unpredictable exercise. When a wine is at its peak is anybody's guess and always just a guess. Cellar conditions affect how quickly a wine ages, and few of us have perfect cellar conditions. Mine is a consistently cool, dark place with little vibration. I don't worry about humidity variations, nor should you. (Here's why.) So far, it's been sufficient. As with any cellar, I've had my surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant.

Corks, for instance, can be an unpleasant surprise in any cellar. Most corks last at best 25 years in the bottle. As they age, they contract even with the bottle on its side and the wine in contact with one end. Eventually, they fail and wine starts to drip out of the bottle--fruit fly nirvana. The contact with air is the wine's demise. This is why several of the 1st-Growth Bordeaux chateaux, Mouton and Lafite, and Australia's Penfolds regularly conduct re-corking clinics throughout the world. Great after-market service.

I've found that any wine older than a decade is probably best opened with an Ah-So, sometimes called a Butler's Friend. These two-pronged openers can often retrieve a dry cork, a crumbly cork, or any other cork in a fragile state.

And if you have a wine over 25 years old, what are you waiting for--Open That Bottle Night? How much older do you and that wine need to get?

When I'm 64

I'm often asked how long a particular wine will age, and I say it's a crap shoot. Depends. (No, not that one.) Depends on your cellaring conditions. But a lot depends on you. Do you like aged wines? Most think wine, particularly Cabernet-based red wine, continues to improve in a never-ending upward trajectory. It doesn't. Most go through peaks and valleys, opening and closing, and improving gradually, plateauing, then fading.

But even still, do you like aged wines? With age, everything recedes. (Insert age-related comment here) That intense fruit of youth fades into the whole of the wine over time. If anything was out of balance, e.g. high alcohol or cheek-drying tannins, when the wine was young, that receded fruit will make it more so when it's older.

Appreciating an older wine, with its lack of youthful fruit, but with complexity and subtleties gained from aging almost begs a comparison to that of a woman--pretty and fresh in her teens yet beautiful and enchanting in her maturity.

I once heard Rob Davis, longtime winemaker at Jordan Winery in California, tell a story about walking in the vineyards near harvest time with legendary winemaker Andre Tchelistcheff. Rob had picked several grapes and examined them with his refractometer, a device that measures the sugar content of grapes. With great certainty, he pronounced the grapes ripe for harvest.

Andre picked one of the grapes, popped it into his mouth, and said, "Yes, but are they ready?" Rob told him he didn't understand the difference. Andre said, "Ripe is a an 18-year-old virgin. Ready is a 40-year-old divorcee."

That would be a great place to end this post, since it can't be topped. But, let me just say that enjoying wines in their maturity is not for everyone, nor should it be. Youth, although wasted on the young (I wish I'd said that), is very appealing even with wines traditionally thought to need cellaring. Winemakers today generally craft their wines to show well upon release. What more do you want? And, if you can answer that, you should be cellaring wine.

Open That Bottle (Any) Night

Ten years ago, Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, the husband-and-wife team who write the column "Wine Notes" for The Wall Street Journal, conceived "Open That Bottle Night." Every year on the last Saturday of February, they encourage all of us who have "Hotel California" cellars ("You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave") to take one of those "special occasion" bottles out of the cellar and drink it on that night.

The point being that there's never an occasion special enough to open those bottles. Thanksgiving? The whole family's together, but the food clashes with most wines. Christmas? The whole family's together, but Uncle Bill will pour his glass to the brim, and Aunt Jill only drinks sweet wines, and Aunt Pill thinks she's allergic to sulfites. . .

So, the point being that opening that special bottle is a special occasion, and it's about the wine, not someone's birthday, graduation, wedding, or promotion--all fine occasions for celebration and certainly wine should be involved, preferably Champagne. But the subtleties of a fine, aged wine are rarely appreciated when crowds, commotion, and exotic foods are involved.

My special bottle-occasion night would involve standing up that bottle for several days beforehand. A younger wine I would decant; a really old bottle I might not. Although it would undoubtedly throw a fair amount of sediment, an old wine might have a very short window of life once it's opened and decanting would hasten that. I'd make the food enhance the wine. Roast beef or roast chicken without dramatic spices or capsaicins put the focus on the wine not the food.

And, for Pete's sake, let's do this more than once a year. Maybe once a month is more like it. And, don't worry that the occasion is not special enough. None is. And, if the bottle has emotional meaning (and what long-aged one doesn't?), drinking it will heighten and focus that emotion but not end it. When the wine is gone, the bottle, label, and memories remain, including now the memory of drinking it.

Plastic cup or Polystyrene Cup?

Riedel or Libbey? Spiegelau or Luminarc? Stem or tumbler? Or how about colored crystal stemware elaborately cut and handed down from your grandmother? What is the proper wineglass?

How about plastic cup or Polystyrene? (Tangent: there's no such thing as a styrofoam cup, but Polystyrene is what we commonly call a styrofoam cup. For the tangentally inclined, read more here.)

I've enjoyed many wines served in a tumbler at pasta palaces and find nothing objectionable about the practice except the pretentiousness that we have much in common with Italian peasantry. But then pretentiousness are us in the wine business, so hard to get excited.

No, what separates the cork dork from the wine drinker is that unavoidable occasion where nothing that could technically be called "glass" is available. Think small town motel with in-room coffee maker, Polystrene cups stacked up beside it. Plastic cups in the bathroom, nicely shrink-wrapped. It's Sunday and not a store that sells glassware is open. You have not brought your travel box of Riedel. What do you do? What do you do?

Do you refuse to open the bottle because it would be unfair to the wine? Because without the proper stemware, it would lessen your enjoyment to the point of pointlessness? Congrats, you are a dork.

It's only a bottle of wine, for Christsake. (See Post # 1, "It's Only a Bottle of Wine.") And, if you brought any wine that couldn't stand the vibrations of a road trip, congrats, you are a dork.

No, for the wine drinker, the question wouldn't be whether to open the bottle. It would be "Plastic Cup or Polystyrene Cup?"

Okay, so the answer is obvious, if you are tangentally inclined and read more here or up there.
Alcohol will increase the styrene migration from the cup into the wine, so the plastic cup wins out.

Wine is for drinking.

Thanks,
Jim