"...Very few wines gain appreciably with age..."

And the sky is blue.

The enormous majority of wine is jug wine or one small step above it. It is clearly true for all those wines, so the statement "very few wines..." is clearly correct.

these rare wines are for the happy few (critics) who can and will afford it. most have to decide between either nice food or nice wine. how to take your bottle to MacD ?? where more and more pop up also in France. Even if only one or two tasted in a lifetime, these bottles generate nice conversations....

-- marius

Is that a haiku? Seems a little long... the rhyme is a little hard to grasp, must have been wonderful in the original language...

;-)

I agree that in terms of volume only a small proportion of wine will age well.

But I don't see how it follows that very few wines will age well. A lot of wine is made, and wines made in smaller quanitities are generally speaking of better quality. Surely the list of wines worth ageing must be in the hundreds if not thousands. I would not call that very few.

If you want examples of wines that will gain with age, I would start with all Clarets down to (and including) Cru Bourgeois level, and pretty much all Burgundies down to village level. That must be a good few hundred!

OK, I was thinking of "few" in terms of percentage, not numbers.

Glorious quote by Roland Topor, first in French (but I add a translation further down):

"Une bonne vieille bouteille de vin est aussi rare, aussi miraculeuse qu'un vieux pas con. ça arrive, mais il vaut mieux ne pas trop y compter."

"A good old bottle of wine is so rare, so miraculous as an old guy who is not silly. It might happen, but do not count on it".

Food for thought...

Yves

Well, here's my story.

Best friend always complained that I never had any cabernet around (don't favor it-- too tannic). So I bought 2 cases of '94 Mondavi cab (the regular stuff, around $16/bottle). This was in '96 or whenever the '94s came out.

Shortly thereafter my friend moved to Texas (I live in NY). So I had the wine sitting around a long time, and opened it only when he came to visit or I went there.

So I've been sampling the same wine for a long time (I said I don't favor it, I never said I won't drink it).

The tannins have subsided and it's a very different wine a decade or more later.

I'd imagine a lot of cabs would react similarly, if stored properly.