Recreating old wines

Wouldn't you first need to have vineyards of old franc de pieds vines?

That seems obstacle enough to me...

-E

Beside the problem in using the exact varieties and clones of the grapes used in the past, one would have to use exactly the same methods of fermentation, wood aging, etc., and I doubt if all of this information could be obtained in exacting detail for many wines.

There are still a few wines from the far past that still are good. Michael Broadbent has tasted the 1727 Rudesheimer Apostelwein from the huge cask in the Bremer Ratskeller which was still decent. Of course, being in cask, the wine in the cask must be topped off with high quality Riesling now and then, so this is not a pure 1727 wine. Broadbent also tasted a bottle of 1846 Schloss Johannisberger , presented by Prince Metternich, and it still was very good. Several vintage Maderias from at least 1789 on are still outstanding. Several vintages of Constantia from the late 1700s and early 1800s have been reported to still be very good. True Tokaji Essencia , back to at least the early 1700s likely is still good. One could find a few examples, such as the 1811, at auction many years ago. Much of the really old examples seem to have been lost during WWII.

cwdjrxyz wrote on Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:43:15 -0700 (PDT):

I dont want to pay for ancient wines and I'm not well enough known to be offerred them :-( However, I sometimes wonder if they are as good as writers say or is it just sentiment that would be disproved by a blind test if anyone could bring themselves to do it?

I like blind tasting. But not sure that it "proves" anything one way or the other in this context. What ancient wines are you testing? What are you going to pair them with? If a panel prefers a 1959 Mouton tasted blind next to a 1900 does it mean anything?

There's all sorts of issues with ancient (I'll define as preWWII for my purposes) - storage issues, fake bottles, etc. There's one prominent advocate of old wines who I'm convinced is totally deluded/ unable to taste. But I also believe notes from people I trust on much older bottles that they like. If '59 Mouton blind elicits guesses as '82 Bordeaux and seems to gain in glass over night, what's to stop that same bottle for aging another 50 years?

And of course there are different criteria one can choose. I don't think anyone who likes Madiera doesn't like good 19th century versions. But with red claret there are people who prefer young, and others who prefer with a lot of age. So who did the blind tasting would make a big difference.

DaleW wrote on Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:07:31 -0700 (PDT):

Oh, I haven't done it but I just wondered if a taster would say a hundred-year old wine was "still very good" if they did not know in advance what it was. Blind tasting of these expensive items is probably impractical but I still suspect that sentiment plays a large part in the comments.