Passion for Art of Aging Red Wines

Wine lovers revere old red wine that’s properly aged. Such wines acquire a patina, a subtle bouquet that replaces the audaciously fruity aroma of youth and gives it a certain grace.

Aging wine, therefore, becomes a practice wine collectors love. They buy cases, stash them in cool, light-free holes in the ground, or in insulated closets, and wait patiently for a day a decade or two hence when the wine has gained its proper level of development.

Recently I wrote here on the aging of white wine, a far more mystical process than the aging of red. I noted that few white wines age at all, and though some do, it should be done with much care and frequent tasting to make sure they don’t run past drinkability into decay.

Red wine is perceived to be less risky, and in a way it is. Red wine contains more tannin than white wine. Also called polyphenols, tannins act as an anti-oxidant, buffering the wine from getting brown before it’s time to drink it.

But knowing how long to age a bottle, knowing when to consume it for maximum enjoyment, is an art, not a science, and it requires knowledge of a number of factors.

* Some red wines, lighter-styled wines like Beaujolais, don’t age at all and should be consumed young.

* Some red wines (such as most Zinfandels) hit their peak rather quickly; others (like Rhones and Barolos) take many decades before they lose their astringency and smooth out to be enjoyable.

* A wine may reach a peak and stay there for many years, offering more and more complexity, before begining to decline. And while at its peak, the wine still changes, but the enjoyment factor remains about the same.

* The length of time a bottle takes to reach a peak of drinkability is pretty much a function of the person doing the consuming. I have tasted wine that one person swears has yet to show its greatest charms while others at the same table are stating categorically that the wine is past its prime and dying.

Indeed, this last point should be emphasized. What is a peak? Is it a point at which everyone agrees it is great wine?

The British, for instance, love that older, almost dusty-resiny-earthy component of older red wine that is unmistakeable as a bottle that is long in the tooth. For the Brits, it’s the charm of age that they love, and they are less critical of a lack of fruit than Americans. Though many Americans understand this British proclivity, they silently pray for more of the fruit of youth.

To some people a peak is a fixed point based on the vintage, because the wine carries historical significance. For instance, if you are 50 this year, having a bottle of wine with the vintage date of 1940, your birth year, will probably be a joy. For you such a wine may taste great even though the bottle is well past its real prime. Considerations of emotion often supersede our noses and taste buds.

But the true enjoyment of older red wine is the process--the sampling with friends of the fruit of our caches, to see where the wines are in terms of development. And to see where we are. Those who pursue this quest with a passion usually do so with a degree of style sometimes seen as silly by the outside world.

Haskell Norman of Northern California, Bipin Desai and Tom Ash, both of Riverside, Andrew and Linda Lawlor of Michigan, and Tawfiq Khoury of San Diego are some of the folks who have built huge cellars of old red wines and who stage major events (often dinners) for friends to sample them. Many of these events carry a price tag that would scare a Trump; rarely does it dissuade the wine faithful.

Occasionally a bottle is found to have aged badly. This happens partly because the speed of any chemical reaction is dependent on the temperature of the liquid.

A chemical reaction in liquid can be slowed down to half its normal speed by dropping the temperature 10 degrees centigrade. Storing wine at 70 degrees Fahrenheit, about 21 degrees centigrade, may age red wine too fast. To double the life span of the wine, the bottles should be stored at 54 degrees Fahrenheit (about 12 degrees centigrade), and the wines will retain their red color and fresh aromas much longer.

Waiting decades to drink a bottle sounds, to newcomers, like a lot of hokum, but the trade offs are usually worth the effort.

Dozens of writers have addressed this and one commentary I prefer on the subject comes from Napa Valley resident Bob Thompson, who said it this way in his “Notes on a California Cellarbook”:

“The softness of texture and the gentle, mysterious flavors that creep into wine with age compete with the tastes of fresh fruit for first place on the list of qualities I hope to find in (older red) wine. Bottle bouquet is a bit of an acquired taste. Sometimes an old wine has hints of mushrooms, sometimes damp earth, now and again a faint, faint echo of warm tar.”

Not particularly appealing, is it? Mushroom, earth, tar? But Thompson means that these components must not dominate the wine or else its essence is gone, the fruit of youth has flown. Wine lovers, even the British, want fruit in their aged wine, and they live dangerously by aging them with the sole purpose of trading off some of the fruit of youth to gain complexity of time.

This quest to take a raw, untamed, unruly kid with gangly arms and spindly legs and turn him into a statesman is engrained in dedicated wine collectors. I know men well into their 70s who are still stashing away young wines that they know won’t be ready to consume for at least a decade or more.

They do not feel beyond the reach of the reaper. Nor does it matter to them whether they have offspring who will enjoy their fruits after they have gone. The process of aging wine is part of the life they lead, akin to Walter Lippman’s marvelous line, “Old men plant trees they will never sit under.”

The quest is greater than experiencing the result.

But knowing which young wines will age, and how long, is a subject of much debate. Not even wine makers, those who know the grapes they grow, can make very accurate projections of the life span of wines when they are very young.

One of the best at it is Paul Draper, the wine maker for Ridge Vineyards, whose comments on side labels of his wines are usually good reflections of when to consume his wines.

But no red wine is sold with a guarantee. If you buy something hoping it will be great in 20 years and you find out two decades hence that the stuff is closer to moldy leather, who do you blame? Aging red wine is a little luck and a lot of faith.

The amount of tannin in a wine is no clue. It’s true that tannins make the wine astringent and unpleasant to drink, and that these tannins will fade in time. But often, I have found, a wine with loads of tannin retains so much of that hard quality after a decade. Meanwhile the fruit has flown the coop. What’s left is a mouthful of sand.

It used to be felt that tannin was the answer to wine that aged, but now it’s felt that acid and a balance of all elements is a better clue.

California wine makers made some awfully powerful, very tannic Cabernet Sauvignons in the 1970s, expecting that the tannins would protect the wines as they aged. That was only mildly successful, so in the last decade, wine makers realized they had to make major changes in the way they made the wines.

Today’s California wines are honed more carefully, making them seem softer on the tongue, but they appear to be aging better than those of the ‘70s. There are dozens of examples of wineries that have improved their product by careful treatment of the grapes and the juice before it reached the bottle.

Among the wineries I have tasted recently whose Cabernets are better structured are Shafer, Arrowood, Clos Pegase and Fetzer. And the reason this technique appears to work for the men behind these wines is the fruit they are dealing with.

In the days when tannin was seen as mandatory, the process for making the wine did not protect the delicate fruit of the wine as much as today’s procedures do. Today, in fact, wine makers are accenting the fruit first and viewing the tannin level as a mere byproduct.

When you taste the wonderful 1986 Cabernets of the above four producers, you see fruit standing out, and combined with the slightly roasted (or chocolate) character that comes from aging in French oak barrels. But don’t think these wines are any “lighter” than those of the past.

The 1986 Shafer from Stag’s Leap ($16) is a fairly bold, dark wine, but with violet elements; there is a spice in the 1986 Fetzer Barrel Select ($11) you rarely see in wines this reasonably priced; the 1986 Arrowood ($20) has one of the deepest, most complex aromas of young wine I have had in years, yet the lingering aftertaste is deep and lush; the 1986 Clos Pegase ($17), though fairly young and still changing, shows a minty-ness that’s appealing, and after aeration the wine shows marvelous length on the palate.

In years past, with wines of this level of fruit, you would have expected more astringency. Today, you get finesse.

And yet in each case, I have tasted the wines numerous times, with varying degrees of aeration, and found that each of them indicates strongly it will be far better, more deeply complex and intriguing, with some years of bottle age. The fruit is marvelous in these wines; what was delicate was the structure, not the body.

I feel these wines will age because they have structure similar in many ways to the older wines of Louis Martini, J. Pedroncelli, and Parducci--producers whose wines were always considered for immediate consumption, wines not to be aged.

And surprisingly, tastings of older versions of these wines usually show very well decades later.

This brief exploration into the mystical aging process for red wines will be opened up again in a few weeks as I conduct more tastings. Meanwhile, consider that all California wineries are dealing with the issues of immediate drinkability vs. long-term aging and making major strides to make our job of picking wine that will age easier.