How long do you leave a wine in the cellar for? In Australia most wine sold at retail is consumed within 24 hours of sale. Ask any person at cellar door what the most frequent question they get asked is and invariably they will say “How long will the wine age for.” I started placing wine in my cellar and buying Bordeaux indents about 25 years ago because I had consumed some old Bordeaux and thought they were very good and also because I didn’t particularly care for the young Bordeaux.
We had a second night of old discoveries from the cellar a few days ago and as a result I would like to make a few comments based on my experience. Firstly, most of the wines consumed were Australian but 6 were European. Overall, 30% of the wines showed TCA, i.e cork taint. The Europeans had about the same figure but there sample was small. I also found that wines that were clean with good fruit but higher tannins tended to age the best. If a wine showed a lot of green pepper cabernet character when young it still has it when old. Old German Rieslings appear not to develop the kerosene nose that I don’t like. The most amazing observation was that many big company wines that were well priced when young, did soften and showed improvement to about 10 to 15 years. All of which gets me back to my suggestion that one needs to cellar at least 4 bottles and then work out a time frame to revisit them. If you cellar more then you can leave one or two to see how long they will last for. The days of screwcap and diam closures will help too. The other factor to remember is that ideally you want a dark cellar at about 60% humidity with a constant temperature, preferably at 16 or lower. I have a problem doing all this because I like Pinot so much I tend to consume it all within five years, but that’s my own silly fault.


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