Photograph by Katherine Bish
One question sommeliers hear quite often is “How long should I age this wine?”—a tricky query, because different wine drinkers enjoy wine at varying stages of development. The British like their wines to be nearly dead before they call them mature. Americans, for the most part, drink and prefer their wines in their youth. Who’s right? Neither. It’s simply a matter of preference. While there is no “silver bullet” for determining which wines will age better than others, certain factors contribute to a wine’s ability to develop through aging into a sublime, balanced, magical beverage. Here are three.
High Residual Sugar: This is found in dessert wines, German Rieslings, and nontraditional “off-dry” wines from Alsace, Austria, and France. Residual sugar (RS for short) acts as a preservative, warding off oxidation, the ultimate destroyer of most wines.
High Acidity: Acids also act as a preservative, but do so differently than sugars. High acid levels add structure to wines usually produced in cooler climates in higher latitudes—areas like the Loire Valley, Bordeaux, Alsace, Oregon, northern Italy, and New Zealand.
Tannins: The third qualifier for a wine’s longevity is its level of tannins, a set of compounds found both in grape skins and wood barrels (and similar in taste to the “grip” you get from black coffee). The amount and structure of the tannins are what give a wine its ultimate capacity for aging. High-tannin wines come from thick-skinned grapes like cabernet sauvignon and merlot. You’ll also often find a high tannin count in wines from Bordeaux, Piedmont, and Portugal.
Wines that exhibit two or more of these traits will tend to age better than wines with only one. Examples here include German Riesling (exhibiting both high RS and high acidity), red Bordeaux (high in both acidity and tannins), and well-crafted, sweet “dessert”-style wines, including port (high in both RS and tannins).
Two final points to keep in mind: A wine’s ability to age isn’t necessarily a measure of its quality, and even if a wine has all three of the above components, you could open it tonight and still very much enjoy it. Which is certainly the trend, anyway—last year, the average “cellar time” for a bottle of wine purchased in the U.S. was six hours… So why do people keep asking me this question?
About Our Expert: Chris Hoel, CSW, is the co-founder of St. Louis Wine Clinic and the former beverage director of Monarch Restaurant. He writes this monthly column from Napa Valley, where he is a sommelier at The French Laundry.
