When I first fell in love with wine, I was frequently tormented by conflicting desires regarding the bottles that I acquired. Cellar them or drink them?
Just as it is not possible to have one’s cake and eat it too, one cannot keep a wine to build a stash while also getting to drink it to build an inventory of tasting experiences. To make things worse, there’s no way to know whether you’ll be catching the wine at the optimal point of maturity until you’ve pulled the cork. If it seems too young once opened, there’s no undoing the damage of premature opening. And if it seems like you’ve waited too long, there’s no undoing the damage of an overly delayed opening.
I know that my torment over this issue isn’t just a personal peculiarity (though I do have plenty of those), because I’ve spoken with many consumers who ask anguished questions about the optimal time for drinking cherished bottles that sit, enshrined, in their dwellings. After years of wrestling with the issue, I now find it quite easy to advise them, and I invariably advise them to get over their reverence and just drink the damned things.
There are several reasons for this. First, I’ve found that many more wines suffer from being held too long than being drunk too young.
Second, winemaking has changed so much during the past two decades that few wines–even sturdy red wines–really require ageing before becoming enjoyable. Even Barolo and Barbaresco and many classified growth Bordeaux can be enjoyed shortly after release these days if decanted and paired with food that has a little dietary fat (which is a natural sensory buffer against astringent tannins). You may not catch these wines at their absolute apex of complexity by cracking them while still relatively young, but you know for sure that you won’t catch them at their dried, dead nadir.
Third, you don’t need to worry about drinking rather than aging wines from great vintages, because there’s sure to be another great vintage somewhere almost every calendar year.
This is a new situation. For example, if you were debating in 1970 whether to drink or cellar your one bottle of 1961 Bordeaux, you had a real dilemma on your hands, because there just weren’t many regions making great wine back then. There was no telling when you’d get another opportunity to replace that bottle with another of comparable quality. However, a truly revolutionary diffusion of technology and expertise over the course of the past generation has now transferred potential excellence so widely across the globe that there’s no such thing as a bad year. If Bordeaux gets drenched, you can still drink what you’ve got and be secure in the knowledge that you can replace it with this year’s Don Melchor from Chile or Vilafonté from South Africa or Catena from Argentina or Penfolds Bin 707 from Australia or Quilceda Creek from Washington.
They might not all be good in 2018, but I would bet my ass that one or more of them will be fabulous. And when I taste it, I’ll tell you so that you can buy it to replace the Sacred Cow you’ll wisely drink on your next special occasion.
A final reason to grip ’em and rip ’em is that even the luckiest person isn’t guaranteed another day, and you can’t drink your treasured wine tomorrow if you get hit by a bus today. Sure, maybe there’s a heaven, and if so, it would surely be well stocked with wine. But just in case, I’m going to open a really good bottle tonight to toast my good fortune….
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