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.