Does wine really get better with age?
Jeff & Sally Toister Tuesday, July 9, 2013 at 8:13PM There’s an old joke that the average American ages their wine for about 30 minutes. That’s the amount of time it takes to get it home from the store and open it up.
Even wine enthusiasts can find it difficult to keep good wine around too long. Our friends Sarah and Dave recently picked up a bottle of Grenache from Anglim Winery on their first trip to Paso Robles. We met for dinner a few nights later and they shared the bottle with us. It was delicious, but now it’s gone.
On a side note, this is exactly why we always buy at least two bottles of wine we really like.
Would the Anglim Grenache taste even better after a year or two of aging? It’s hard to tell. And, thanks to our friends’ generosity, we don’t get to find out.
Anglim Mourvedre + Terra's Bistro Burger = Awesome
What, in the name of science, can we do?
Fortunately, Sally and I have our own small collection of Anglim wine. We don’t have any Grenache, but we did purchase two bottles of their 2007 Hastings Ranch Vineyard Mourvedre when we visited the winery in 2011.
We consumed the first bottle in February 2012 while dining at Antica Trattoria. We liked it but didn’t feel it paired well with our meal. Our tasting notes included notes of white pepper on the nose with cherry, red plum, earthiness on the palate and a little bit of spice and tannin on the finish. You can read our review here.
We consumed the second bottle two weeks ago while dining at Terra American Bistro. Our tasting notes were nearly identical to the first bottle. However, this time around it complimented our meal perfectly. Sally had Terra’s delicious bistro burger while I had their chipotle skirt steak.
It seems that this wine did improve slightly from about 16 months of aging. Could our differing impressions be due to our choice of food? Possibly. We didn’t record our meal at Antica Trattoria in the previous post, so it’s hard to know for sure.
The unsatisfying end to this story is we can’t say with 100 percent certainty that wine improves with age. I guess we’ll just have to keep experimenting with good wine until we can obtain conclusive proof one way or another!
Reader Comments (2)
Great blog entry guys - and you will be happy to hear that we bought a case of the Grenache recently. We will try to save at least one bottle for a few years...but no promises!
Thanks, Dave. Store a bottle or two where Sarah can't find it, and your success rate may go up :)