Kelli White on wine aging

Well-written piece from somm Kelli White, going into some nice detail on the many factors involved in the aging process:

The best advice I’ve heard on aging is that a wine will be at the plateau at it’s best for as long as it took to get there. If you have a '99 that just peaked–it will probably stay at the peak until 2040. If you had a '99 that peaked in 2010–it’s nearing the end of its drinking window.

Kelli White is. . .?

Somm, author…

That was a really great article. It was probably the most concise and informative article on wine aging that I’ve read. Love the brevity. Too many go too deep into chemistry. She did it just the right amount.

Interesting. Glad there won’t be a test.

Really nice article written by Kelli.

That’s a really REALLY good article about her. I have TWO copies of her Napa Valley book, one is signed. I owned one, and was in charge of the wine section for our school’s auction. I asked her for a signed copy to auction off and raise money. On auction day, I didn’t like how much money was being bid on it, so I bought it myself.

Thanks for posting that story, interesting to learn more about her journey.

Two experiences…

  1. Buy the 1999 Dominus in 2019, drink it, it has great secondary and tertiary aromas, but no fruit left and color is kinda gone. You like it. Decide… this has aged 20 years!
  2. Buy the 1999 Dominus on release and by 2009, it it peaking for you. Every couple years later you try another bottle but none is as good as back in 2009. Verdict…it has aged 10 years and has been in decline the last 10 years.

I am thoroughly in category #2.

Interesting advice, I’ll have to reflect on that.



Coates’ Law of Maturity
Coates’ Law of Maturity is a principle used in wine tasting relating to the aging ability of wine. Developed by the British Master of Wine, Clive Coates, the principle states that a wine will remain at its peak (or optimal) drinking quality for a duration of time that is equal to the time of maturation required to reach its optimal quality

Can’t speak to 99, but 94 Dominus is still far too young.

I should start by saying I think Kelli is one of the few good wine writers. There’s a ton of assumption and “common knowledge” in the article that isn’t well supported by any facts, though. I think the best point is made by Maggie Harrison:

Harrison’s point emphasizes a deeper truth, “People sometimes say, ‘I’m building my wines to age, so the tannins need to be like this, or the acid needs to be like that.’ But no one knows what makes a wine age well. If they did, we would all do it."

The key factor seems to be quality, which is really tough to define, but at least Kelli does touch on that in the article.

The part about oxygen irks me a bit because the idea that oxygen is necessary for bottle development is repeated so often and is clearly not true (as shown by countless wines under screwcaps without the semi-permeable liners). Even the idea that oxidative elevage gives ageworthy wines and reductive elevage does not is clearly not true, or at least has major exceptions that should be noted (as shown by Hunter Semillon, Clare Riesling, and probably many others – I even had a 15-20 year old Cloudy Bay SB that was in great shape a few years back).

She took on a tough topic here. I think too little is known about it to write a really good article. I’m sure there is some truth in there, but there is too much of “it depends” to know almost anything for sure.

nice
We met her at Press; she was the perfect amount of helpful without being bossy/preachy.

To my understanding, the way she describes how tannins evolve is how people commonly think the case is, but to my understanding, what actually happens in a bottle as wine evolves is very different.

Research shows that a) tannins both split up into smaller molecules and group together into bigger molecules as wines age, but the general direction is from larger to smaller; b) in most cases the larger the tannin is, the more astringent (grippy) it is. As tannins get smaller they little by little lose their astringency, but as the tannins become small enough, they can be tasted instead. The finest tannins don’t really grip, but can accentuate a bitter taste in a wine.

For example seed and wood tannins are smaller than those found in the skins, which explains why a wine with heavily extracted seed tannins or a wine aged in new oak barrels can be noticeably more bitter than a wine that is made from gently crushed grapes and is aged in older oak barrels or other vessels (thus can be more grippy, yet still show less bitterness).

A couple of things to add here:

She does not touch upon the fact that as wine ages, especially in its early stages, and free anthocyanins combine with tannins, the structure of the tannin changes such that it has a lower affinity to bind to your salivary proteins and therefore will appear ‘less astringent’. This is what happens more quickly with micro ox - you can see that the ‘total tannins’ have not changed but their ‘perceived astringency’ is much lower. It gets more complicated because this process depends upon a number of factors, including the sheet amount of monomeric anthocyanins a wine has when it’s young, the amount of both short chain and longer chain tannins it has when it’s young, storage conditions during elevage, and much more.

The other point I don’t agree with, as is noted above, is that the more reductive the winemaking process, the less age worthy said wine may be. This runs counter to ‘logic’. To me, I believe that every wine has a ‘redox’ potential and more oxygen it is exposed to during fermentation and elevage, through racking, etc, the less potential it will have to ‘handle’ oxygen as it ages and therefore all things considered, the less capable it will be of ‘improving’ over time. For example, think of wines that are heavily micro oxd or racked numerous times in the first year of age to get them ready to market faster. My guess is that, in general, these wines will not ‘age well’.

Cheers

What I’ve understood re:oxidative winemaking is that the must oxidation is more important than the oxidation that happens over elevage. For example the must-browning that many white Burgundy and German Riesling producers employ (letting the must turn brown as the easily oxidized compounds first oxidize and turn brown, then drop out of the solution) is said to be one of the factors that let the wine age so impressively. Another great case in point is how Dom Pérignon is made: no attempts to produce the grapes or the must from oxidation are made, letting the must get all the oxygen it gets. However, the wine is made completely reductively after that point and the winery goes to great lengths to protect the wine from oxygen during the vinification and aging. However, the end result is one very long-lived Champagne made in a completely reductive fashion. This is quite obvious in the nose of a young Dom Pérignon: it’s almost always full of reductive notes of flint and gunpowder smoke that often take years - occasionally even a decade - to age out.

My understanding is the same. Dave Ramey does a FANTASTIC job explain this (and many other concepts - the man is great at conveying science-y stuff in plane English) on Levi’s IDTT podcast.

+1. She’s lived an interesting life. And I appreciated the bit about being a gracious guest in the face of flawed wines.

Yes, I read a great article about tannins a while back. Maybe in World of Fine Wine? What I clearly remember is that the “common knowledge” as she presents it in the article is so iversimplified that it is basically not true, for some of the readons you’ve mentioned.

As I said, I’m not sure this article is as good as the praise it’s getting.