You're Not Supposed to Like Old Wine
It's Weird and Nerdy. So I'm Going to Write About How Much I Love It
In what world does the photo above make you think, “Yum! Let’s have dinner!” Maybe a world inhabited only by ghosts, pirates, ghost pirates, and rich white people.
You’ve been led to believe that older wine is better wine. This is not true. Old wine is different. It’s a niche interest, much like aged steak – which is gamey, cheese-like, and interesting, but not something I’m willing to pay a lot of money for. I’m not into aged cheese. Or aged humans, despite what the Pornhub ads think they know about me.
Aged wine is more interesting than hot. No one drinks 30-year-old Bordeaux and thinks, “That’s lip-smacking delicious!” The fruit has faded, the tannins have settled into gross sediment, the acid and alcoholic bite have lost their fight, and it’s lost its ripe redness and gone brown like an open apple. All you’re left with is its soft, thin, quiet essence. Like an older writer who ceases to indulge in the ornate, overwrought, flowery language of his noble craft and just states the damn facts.
Older wine is fascinating, but in a slightly sad way. Which is not at all how aging is being positioned by Pornhub.
Also, it’s a bit of a lottery. Young wine is factory fresh, each bottle poured straight from the barrel and sent in perfectly cooled trucks to a store, you know like food should be.
Older wine has been around. And who knows where it’s been. It might have seen some hard times. Some sick bastard may have kept it on top of his refrigerator. And even if it’s lived a fine life, it might be shy when it gets some air for the first time in decades, and play dead for four hours. Or maybe it never comes to life. It’s food after all. And consuming all food is a weird-ass thing to do.
On my lovely wife Cassandra and my dateaversary1, I like to open a bottle from the year we met, 1997. It’s not considered a great year in any wine region on earth, and it’s definitely past its prime. Which makes 1997s pretty cheap to buy on online auctions. On her vintage chart, The Financial Times’ great wine writer Janis Robinson writes that 1997 Bordeaux “provided some easy drinking in the early years of this century. Few show any possibility of improvement.” So cold, Janis. So cold.
This year, I opened a 1997 Château Destieux, a decent Bordeaux from Saint-Emilion2. It was shockingly good and much fresher than we are. There wasn’t even that much sediment. We finished faster than we meant to, with less contemplation. I think the only descriptor we used was “good.”
But that’s only part of why I like old wine. I like it because that label was staring at us the whole meal. 1997. 1997. 1997. We had to talk about what that year was like. Who we were when we met. What we were expecting. How we could not have pictured where we are now, 3,000 miles away, with a kid, happy, and somehow old enough for ads to meet older women who, if I’m being honest, look pretty damn good.
COMMUNITY DISCUSSION
Do you like older wines? If so, which ones? What are some good bargains? I think older Riojas are great and surprisingly cheap at auctions. Is this how you get a discussion going? I’m only used to yelling my opinion.
No, you shut up.
Right bank of the Bordeaux River, so mostly merlot. This is the only educational part of the Corrupt Wine Writer.
I only like old wine when it is somebody else’s wine I am drinking. If their cork is deteriorated or their wine is oxidized, then I can offer grace and not feel bad that I threw money away on a bum bottle. Only exception to this is my collection of vintage ports, but I still have only gone 18 years with those thus far.