In the past, I didn’t give much thought to wine left over in an open bottle, except to practice my own advice of refrigerating the bottle to preserve the wine for drinking in the next day or two. Mostly, my husband and wine writing partner Ed McCarthy and I had very little leftover wine. Together we would enjoy a bottle to the full almost every night over the course of a meal.
Now I live alone, and I am also consuming less wine than I once did. Every bottle I open easily lasts me three or four days. At that rate, I can open only two bottles each week.
To a wine lover, two bottles per week provides precious little variety. Adding to that frustration is the fact that I have a cellar full of wine which Ed passionately collected over forty-plus years. Every bottle is a memory that I cherish. I want to experience them all.
The cellar is rich in Barolo. I started there. One at a time, I opened and consumed a trio of Barolos —1985 Tenuta Carretta Barolo Cannubi, 1988 Marchesi di Barolo’s Barolo Riserva, 1989 Cordero di Montezemolo Barolo. The wines were fascinating. The Cordero di Montezemolo was particularly impressive, still showing the delicacy of La Morra. But for two-plus weeks, I drank nothing but 35- to 40-year-old Barolo.
Whenever the opportunity arose to share my cellar, I took wines to dinners with friends. But I discovered that that situation could be fraught. I brought two 1990 Saint-Émilions to dinner at the home of a fellow Bordeaux lover, Château Troplong Mondot (Grand Cru Classé) and Château Trotte Vieille (Premier Grand Cru Classé). The wines were gentle with age, rich in tertiary aromas and flavors and sweet with resolved tannins. I loved them. But a couple of the guests demurred. “What’s the point?” one of them asked. “You can’t buy them, can you?”
That was when I realized that not every wine lover “gets” older wine. If you drink old wines the way you drink a current wine, you could perceive them as lacking. They can have less flavor, certainly less fruit, and they don’t deliver the upfront intensity nor the power of many younger wines.
I believe that old wines deserve reverence. However delicious they are or not, they represent wine history. The quality of the vintage, how the grapes were grown in those days, whether any winemaking trends were prevalent in the region: the wines inspire these reflections.
Old wines deserve ceremony and thoughtfulness. To drink them alone is enough of a pity, let alone allowing them to become commonplace by drinking the same, aged wine for four nights. But I realized I could not share them with just anyone without feeling disappointed.
On a Master of Wine trip in Argentina in November, I shared these thoughts with my seat mate on a long bus ride. How can I enjoy my older wines without rendering them trivial by drinking the same wine for four nights?
“Get a Coravin!” he replied.
Duh.
For Christmas, I bought myself a Coravin. Many wine lovers are familiar with this device. It penetrates the cork of a wine bottle and releases a small amount of wine while dispersing argon into the empty space in the bottle. The cork remains in the bottle; without air in the bottle, the wine is preserved for months of future drinking.
I don’t use my Coravin for current wines: too much fuss and too much expense in replacing the argon capsules. And yet when I open a bottle with the Coravin, I drink less, as if the device enforces willpower.
For my aged wines, the device is ideal. My wine cave currently holds about a dozen partial bottles of wine that I have already “accessed.” Any night of the week I can have a glass of one of these— great Barolo, Bordeaux, Napa Cabernet, Côte Rôtie, Priorat. I tend to hold onto my “accessed” bottles for a couple of months, alternating each night between old wines and current vintages depending on my food or mood. I detect no change in the aged wines from the first glass to the day I finish the bottle.
I didn’t need a Coravin when I had someone to share my wine. And yet, now that I have the device, I sort of wish we had bought one sooner, to check from time to time how our wines were aging. Disappointments are inevitable with aged wines. I have had to pour more than one cherished bottle down the sink.
My dilemma is an unusual one and in discussing it, I am not asking anyone to feel sorry for me. I am simply grateful that a solution was hiding in plain sight.
After finishing this article, I treated myself to a glass of 35-year old Barolo, the 1989 Carretta Cannubi. It was much more expressive than the 1985 Cannubi that I had opened, maybe my best wine to date. It was smooth as can be with tobacco and red fruit notes and a long, satisfying finish. I have another three glasses left in that bottle to enjoy on a future Sunday evening. I bet that Ed would be proud of his wine.
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Editor’s Note: Ed McCarthy was a terrific columnist for Wine Review Online from the inception of the website nearly 20 years ago. Beyond that role, however, Ed’s writings earned him recognition as one of the most influential voices in fine wine over the course of the past four decades. With his wife Mary, he co-authored Wine For Dummies, White Wine For Dummies, Red Wine For Dummies, Wine Buying Companion For Dummies, French Wine For Dummies, Italian Wine For Dummies and California Wine For Dummies (Wiley & Sons). Wine For Dummies is one of the largest-selling wine books ever; having sold about one million copies to date and having been translated into 34 languages. Both Wine For Dummies and Italian Wine For Dummies were nominees for a James Beard Award, in 1995 and 2001 respectively. Ed’s own book, Champagne for Dummies, was also nominated for the James Beard Award as best wine book of the year, in 1999. All of us at WRO continue to remember him with admiration and fondness in the wake of his passing in May of 2024, and are delighted to have Mary return to writing for this site in the article to which this note is appended. Click on WRO’s “Contributors” page for a fuller written appreciation of Ed’s life and work, as well as a link to his column archive. ~MF