Old Means Better? He Just Won’t Swallow It

Does just being old automatically make a wine great?

Nearly all of the world’s wine is meant to be consumed young. Of the small amount that is made to be aged, just a tiny fraction will be around to see the age of 10, let alone 20 or 100. Yet the phrase “like fine old wine” implies that any wine old enough is worthy of praise.

Roy Brady challenges that assumption.

“How did this reverence for old wine develop?” he asked the other day.

This wine educator, collector of wine and wine books, wine author and former mathematics professor is a man you might (if you didn’t know him well) call a curmudgeon. More accurately, he is a bright, inquisitive but contentious fellow who enjoys challenging dogmas others consider self-evident.

On a recent warm summer day, the white-haired 72-year-old Brady sat in an easy chair in his San Fernando Valley home and mused over the question he had just posed. He raised a copita of a chilled fino Sherry to his marvelous mustache, sat back and ran through the ideas that he touches on in a forthcoming book entitled “Old Wine, Great Wine?”

It is the question mark in the title that changes the phrase into an argument, and Brady defends his position strongly. He has tasted wines for a half century and has made copious notes on thousands of them. At some point he decided that most old wine wasn’t particularly fun.

He said it dawned on him that if the aura of the label and the history embedded in the date on an old bottle didn’t infect the judgment of the taster, a lot of old wines would show themselves to be merely old, not enjoyable.

He quoted the late Harry Yoxall, a wine author and lover of Burgundy, who once was asked about the pleasure he must have had after a tasting of very old wines.

“What an experience it was to drink them!” Yoxall is reported to have said. “But a pleasure? No.”

Brady was emphatic: “Most people try to mesmerize themselves into thinking any old wine is great.

“Take vertical tastings, where they trot out wines dating back 50 or 100 years. Usually at those affairs they have a guru who’s brought in to tell them all how wonderful the wines are. I recall not long ago tasting the BV (Beaulieu Vineyard) Private Reserves of 1964, 1966, 1968 and 1970. All of them came from excellent storage conditions.

“Well, they were all far beyond where I want to drink them.

“When I go into a restaurant and they are unsure about the vintage of a wine I’ve ordered, I want to know if it’s young enough, not old enough.”

Brady first made public his feelings on the subject in 1986 in an article in the Journal of Gastronomy, published by the American Institute of Wine and Food. At about the same time, auctioneer/author J. Michael Broadbent of Christie’s auction house in London wrote an article for Vintage magazine from the opposite point of view, extolling the greatness of old wine.

Brady read Broadbent’s article and, “just to tease him a bit,” sent Broadbent a copy of his Journal article. After reading it, Broadbent penned a scathing note--though, since he’s British, the tone of his hand-written letter was not impolite. In effect, however, Broadbent told Brady he was all wet.

Brady was amused. He replied with typical wry wit, noting “the inverse correlation between intelligence and legibility of handwriting” and how bright Broadbent must be, so nearly unreadable had his letter been. Brady also vigorously defended his position in the reply, and a dialogue of sorts was begun.

Out of this controversy came the small book that Brady will release soon. More than just a book, it is a collectible.

Published by Santa Susana Press, “Old Wine, Great Wine?” is a signed and numbered gem of the book-maker’s art. This handsome work was printed on Johannot paper, designed and produced by D’Ambrosio under the direction of Norman Tanis, dean of libraries at Cal State Northridge, and has a sculpted cover and an attractive slip case.

Only 65 copies will be published, at $225 a copy. Book collectors who are wine lovers will have a dual interest: The text is essentially an expansion of Brady’s 1986 article. For details on the book, write to Santa Susana Press, University Libraries, California State University Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge 91330.

Brady is an erudite man whose wine-book collection once rivaled his extensive wine collection. In “Old Wine, Great Wine?” Brady writes:

“Beyond the physical composition of wines and the individual differences in tasters, there is a social side to evaluating wine in age. Thorstein Veblen’s doctrine of conspicuous consumption applies nicely here.”

And he quotes Stuart Chase as summarizing that doctrine, that people with surpluses in their lives “do not use the surplus primarily for useful purposes . . . (but) to impress other people with the fact that they have a surplus.” And the conspicuous consumption thesis means that old wine is often served not for its great taste, but to impress. And that guests usually buy the argument that if it’s old, it must be great, even if it’s not particularly enjoyable.

“A lot of writers foster that notion,” said Brady, pouring more of the fino. “And nobody in the wine business can be open about this. So we end up revering old wine for the sake of reverence, and this reverence is by people who generally have never had the experience of truly great old wine.

“But when you’re paying $1,000 for a seat at one of these old-wine dinners, you have to convince yourself that the wine you are sipping, and finding quite unpleasant, is ‘great wine.’ And then you hear the guru tell you it’s great. So you believe it.”

Brady goes deeper, suggesting that some wine delivers only what is expected.

“One of my deepest convictions is that the human race proceeds basically on preconceptions,” he said. “There is such a lack of experience. . . . And yet I know many wine lovers with great experience, and most of them go by preconception too.”

He told a story of a tasting of New York wines he conducted some years ago. Through most of the tasting, the guests denigrated the wines. “As well they should have,” said Brady. “They were pretty bad.

“So I slipped out into the kitchen and decanted into one of the New York wine bottles a superb California Zinfandel, a great wine, and I served it. Well, the comments were just the same, ‘aargh, swill,’ et cetera. When I revealed what I had done, boy, did the backing and filling begin!”

Brady argues that in decades past, young wine wasn’t usually very pleasant, so a lot of it had to be aged to make it palatable. But today, “Wine making has changed. Wines are more drinkable young, so they don’t age as well.

“Some wines do age, of course, but very little of it. And the way wines are made these days, damn little of it ages.”

He acknowledged that the subject of his article and book is “a minor imbecility, but in this very small area I hate to see people who are intelligent making these incorrect generalizations, believing folklore.”

As for his “debate” over the subject with Broadbent, Brady just shrugs and says, “He completely missed my point.” Yet in the book’s epilogue, Brady makes it clear he relishes the dialogue that ensued.

Wine of the Week

1986 Beringer Cabernet Sauvignon “Private Reserve” ($35) --Rarely does this spot feature so expensive a wine, but this is special. Loaded with black cherry notes, herbal nuances, toasty elements from oak aging and a deeply complex, cedary finish, it is clearly a star of the vintage. It rivals even Beringer’s superb and long since sold-out 1985 Private Reserve. After evaluating this wine blind and finding it well ahead of a group of excellent Cabernets, I tried the same bottle 24 hours later and it had actually improved.

This wine will be released in three weeks in relatively good supply (14,000 cases), but demand will be high. It may be seen in some discounters at about $28, which makes it a good buy considering what’s out there at twice the price and more. (Runner-up in the blind tasting, by the way, was the fruity and delightful 1986 Raymond Napa Valley Cabernet, an excellent value at $16.)