How long to keep wine for

"YorkshireSoul" snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com asks...

up to five years, but is that five years from 2001, or five years from when it was released ?<

Let's look at this objectively.

If it were to mean "5 years from the vintage date", whom would see and benefit from that info, prior to the bottle being (bottled and) released to the public? The vintner?

Always here for my fellow syngraphist or oenophile.

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You must remember that when they mark the time a wine can age on a label, it is only an indication and depends on a lot of outside influencers.

If you don't have a good storage area for your wine, this can accelerate the ageing of the wine. The five years is now three.

From experience and general knowledge on which wines age well is your base then I believe he best way to determine the ageing capacity of a wine is to taste a bottle now and then and note the evolution. This is why it is good to buy at least

Marc "YorkshireSoul" a écrit dans le message de news: bmo1s6$edb$ snipped-for-privacy@titan.btinternet.com...

And after it has been released, who would know when it has been released, and thus when it is ready for drinking? The vintner.

I think you are correct, but it would be a lot more useful if the cellaring advice for a vintage would refer to speciifc years, e.g. "Cellar until 2006".

I have also encountered the opposite issue of reading in a book advice like "You should drink a 1998/99 vintage of this wine", when I had little idea when the author thought I would be reading the advice. Or was he just thinking about when he was writing it?

I would ask book and label writers to think a bit more about their readers!

I am blessed with having a perfect cellar, underground, air cooled, slightly humid, so I hope any wines purchased will age at the normal rate.

When Jim says..........

"Let's look at this objectively.

If it were to mean "5 years from the vintage date", whom would see and benefit from that info, prior to the bottle being (bottled and) released to the public? The vintner?"

........he assumes that the retailer can tell me when the wine was released and how long they have had it in stock for, despite selling wines at over £20 a bottle, these sort of requests bring only blank looks at Tesco.

Other retailers might not want to admit that they have found a particular wine a bit hard to sell, thus the display bottle I am about to purchase has been upright on the shelf for a couple of years since release, at least a 'Cellar Until...." date would help a little.

Another thought, would some bigger retailers always advise that you drink their wines right away in order to try and keep turnover up ?

Mike

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Salut/Hi Jim,

le/on 17 Oct 2003 06:52:12 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

I have to admit that I've never really thought about this.

If I buy a 2001, and the winemaker says it will improve for "up to 6 years", I'm pretty sure that they mean it will continue to improve until

In my wine database I make explicit time delays "minimum age to drink" "maximum age to drink" and this is added to the vintage date to give years when I should start drinking and have drunk by.

As far as I understand it advice is changing to drink earlier than used to be the case. I think it is partly what you suggest (though it is not only the big retailers who are to blame). Plus the fact that there is only a small percentage of customers prepared to cellar wines

- so they do not say "cellar for 5 to 10 years" to avoid putting customers off.