Winophilia

In a world seeking instant gratification, more and more winemakers are aware that today’s wine drinkers want their wines to taste good early. But can wines be made to have offer quick accessibility and still have the structure and balance to age?  Here’s our latest roundtable question for our participating winemakers:

Can wines made to be approachable soon after release actually reward extended cellaring, or is this simply a case of trying to have it all? Do you feel pressure to make your wines immediately enjoyable in order to satisfy the consumer’s demand for instant gratification? What vinification or aging techniques might increase a wine’s early appeal without compromising its ability to develop in bottle over a period of years?

Rupert Symington, Symington Family Estates (Douro Valley, Portugal). Speaking from the point of view of a Vintage Port producer, it is undoubtedly true that there are fewer trade and private customers today who are prepared to cellar wines from the time that they are first released to the point where they can be said to be approaching a degree of maturity. Vintage Port is one of the world’s slowest aging wines, and depending on individual taste can take up to 15 to 20 years to become “mature.” Traditionally it was the London wine merchants that cellared these wines to maturity, but today this role is played almost exclusively by the producers ourselves. In addition to the financial burden, this change has required significant investment in additional cellar space in Gaia, but we believe that the investment is worthwhile for consumers to be able to access and enjoy wines at their peak.

In parallel to this we are also encouraging consumers to enjoy Vintage Ports when young, and this is now possible due to the significant advances in production techniques over the last 20 years. The relatively recent practice of picking key varieties separately has eliminated any of the greenness or roughness in young wines that may have prevailed in the past, and technological developments such as our robotic treading machines have improved the approachability of our young Vintage Ports by softening tannins without compromising in any way their longevity. So, happily, consumers may today buy a full range of Vintage Ports from us with varying degrees of bottle age depending on personal preference, without the need to buy “en primeur” and lock the wines away for several years before pulling a cork.

Olivier Humbrecht, Domaine Zind-Humbrecht (Alsace, France). Aging potential is the result of quality viticulture and winemaking, enhanced by certain vineyard characteristics (soil, climate…). Knowing that a wine can age means also that it will most probably also improve and develop more complexity with time. Most wine amateurs would look for wines with good aging potential: even if they drink the wines young, there is a reassuring factor in knowing it will improve and keep. It’s a little bit like a car: most people keep their cars for a few years only, but they like the fact that it can still be functional 25 years later because it means that it is a quality car.

Usually, great wines are interesting young and old, but some wines become easier to drink only after a few years. It takes some time for the acidity, tannins… to become harmonious. Some wines can show better young: a young fragrant, sweet gewürztraminer will be easier to drink young than a dry, high-acid riesling but it can also age very well. We don’t feel any pressure to make our wines accessible quickly, mostly because it doesn’t really help to do this and we have a few wines that are easier to drink young anyway, such as pinot blanc and gewürztraminer.

As to whether a wine that’s approachable soon after its release can actually reward extended cellaring, my feeling is that extended cellaring will be rewarded for just about any good wine. I half-regret drinking all my Vieux-Télégraphe Châteauneuf du Pape 1998 only a few years after its release. It was so delicious then, but a bottle tasted recently made me regret how precipitate I was.

By the way, the best technique for increasing a wine’s early appeal without compromising its aging ability has nothing to do with vinification:  just harvest the grapes ripe!

Roberto de la Mota, Mendel Wines (Argentina). Certainly consumers are looking for wines that they can drink really quickly, probably because they don’t have cellars for aging their wine in good conditions. An American friend of mine, who is a master sommelier in New York, told me few weeks ago that actually consumers take 15 minutes to cellar their wines, which is the time they need to travel from the store to their home. Obviously this is an exaggeration but what is true is that consumers drink very young wines. They love intensity, full aromas and fruit expression, oak, etc., but normally not the complexity that can be found in old wines with evolution. More than that; I had the bad experience of offering an old French wine to some friends. It was a famous St. Emilion from the very good 1989 vintage, and I saw a strange expression on their faces because they could not understand the wine and obviously they preferred a simpler and younger malbec.

In winemaking we are working to make wines that need less aging in the winery and in the bottle. How we do it? First, we are working in vineyard for lower yields, better balance and the right moment to harvest (i.e., without herbaceous notes, green tannins, bitterness, etc). Second is changes in vinification. We use softer extraction during the maceration (pigeage, or punching down the cap, for example), we use micro-oxygenation to build more structure in our wines while making the tannins rounder and softer), we select barrels by looking for softer and sweeter woods, we use blending to make wines with structure and concentration but also soft and round tannins, and we bottle with the quantity of SO2 and oxygen that the wines need.

But are these wines less capable of aging along time in bottle? Not necessarily! If the grapes were harvested at the right ripeness (not overripe), and the wine has good acidity and pH, good structure (quantity and quality of tannins) and good management of SO2 and oxygen, it should be able to age really well and for a long time in a cellar that doesn’t exceed 62°F.

Mounir Saouma, Lucien Le Moine (Burgundy, France). I feel that there are two categories of consumers today: people who want everything NOW and people who would like to play the game and wait.

After 20 years of winemaking and 11 years of making the Lucien Le Moine wines, I can say that Burgundy and specifically our style here at Le Moine is enjoyable in the first two years in bottle and then the wines need five or six years of rest before we can enjoy them again. In other words, the wines provide two different experiences—fresh and fruity early, more soft and spicy later.

I am against making wine to satisfy a certain category of wine drinker. We do it our own way and with our own convictions, and then we help people to understand these crus of Burgundy that are made in this way. We know that we can never satisfy everyone; that’s why we make 30,000 bottles a year and not more.

Normally Burgundy is a place where great wines are great from the beginning. I never buy a Burgundy that’s not enjoyable during the two years after the bottling. Ageability is another matter. If we let our wines deal with oxygen early on, and during long barrel aging, they will be more fine and elegant and they will age better. I don’t believe that tannic wines age better than elegant wines. To us, classic Burgundy means light extraction, fine vinification, and more than 18 months of aging on the lees, with a late malolactic fermentation, no early sulfuring and gentle bottling without fining or filtration. All of these techniques produce wines that can be very sexy young and will sometimes age forever.  Our 2002, 2006 and now the 2009 vintage are perfect examples of this style.