The key milestone in your progression from beginner in wine appreciation to intermediate level is to buy wine and not drink it immediately. Congratulations, you are now the sort of person who has wine in the house. If a dinner party becomes lively you can go into what you grandly describe as your ‘cellar’ rather than having to play corner shop lottery. As the owner of a burgeoning cellar, it’s helpful to have two sorts of wines in it, those for drinking now and those for keeping. It’s very important to have lots of the former or you’ll find yourself cracking open the 2016 Barbaresco with takeaway pizza.
Keeping wine and not drinking it is one of the great mysteries of wine appreciation to the uninitiated but there’s a good reason for it beyond the joy of visiting your growing stash and rubbing your hands together gleefully. While most wines are best drunk straight after bottling a surprising number of wines will improve with even short term cellaring, up to five years. A chunky red like a good Bordeaux will be full of tannin, acidity, alcohol and fruit, and while it might be impressively intense, it will be better if you wait a few years. A good way to think of it is like a boeuf bourguignon which starts as raw meat, bacon, onions, garlic and wine, all delicious in their own way but which will turn into something harmonious with slow cooking.
Certain white wines really need time too. This is particularly true of high acidity whites like riesling or semillon from the Hunter Valley in Australia. This last one tastes of nothing much when young but after five years starts to blossom with heady flavours of lime marmalade and toasted brioche. Most champagne and English Sparkling Wine will benefit from even just an extra year in bottle - all the flavours open out a bit more. Think of it like leaving your stew out overnight and reheating if we’re persisting with the cooking analogy.
But just to confuse matters, wine is always confusing, there are certain bottles like the 2016 Barbaresco I’m trying to keep my hands off that taste delicious young, and then go through an obstreperous adolescence before coming out the other wise mature and full of wisdom. I find it helpful to consult online database Cellartracker where enthusiasts log the progress of their bottles to decide when to open a bottle I’m not sure about.
If you’re keeping wine for the long term, it’s worth paying for storage with a wine merchant but I have around 50 bottles in the house, none of which I intend to keep for much more than ten years. For this length of time, anywhere cool and dark should be fine, such as a cupboard under the stairs, just avoid extremes of temperature. If you don’t live in a cold Victorian house, it’s worth investing in a wine fridge which keeps your wine at the ideal temperature and humidity. I tend to buy in three or sixes so I can try a bottle a year and then bore my guests senseless with how the wine has improved since the last one.
In my ‘cellar’, a cool larder off the kitchen, my collection leans heavily to red wine and France, especially the Rhone valley. Apart from a few bottles of quite fancy Bordeaux and Burgundy, there’s nothing particularly expensive in there. Most cost around £15-40. I tend to get through whites far too quickly so there’s very little I’m keeping for longer than a year beyond a some white Burgundy and some sweet wines.The wines for drinking now section evolves rapidly but for whites usually involves Picpoul de Pinet, Vinho Verde, English chardonnay and manzanilla sherry while with reds I’m very partial to heady reds from the Lebanon, South Africa, the Languedoc, Portugal and Spain, and lighter wines from Beaujolais and the Loire.
To expand your palate I recommend befriending your local wine merchant. The best way to do that is by spending money. In my 20s I bought some Brunello di Montalcino from Jeroboams for my father’s 60th birthday. They clearly mistook me for a high roller who would regularly spend £400 on a case so for years afterwards I was invited to the company’s lavish Christmas tasting. The other benefit of a friendly wine merchant are the annual clearances where you can pick up interesting wines at a discount.
Before you know it you will be attending tastings and chatting knowledgeably with like-minded enthusiasts. Then you might be want to learn more formally with an organisation like the WSET (Wine and Spirits Education Trust) or form a local wine club. But a word of warning, be very careful whom you try out your expanding knowledge on. Most people won’t care and you’ll get a reputation as a wine bore. The first rule of wine club is you don’t talk about wine club.
A version of this article appeared in the Financial Times last year.
No cool pantry in Melbourne Australia - so it's maybe under the house (free but inconvenient), a wine fridge (costly but convenient), or dedicated storage (expensive, not to inconvenient) I have goone down the last path. It's less than 5km away and it's dozen in, dozen out each month, approximately. Now I need to tackle the stash and get off a few wineclub lists.
Great read, thank you Henry