I am often curios how Drinking windows can be so different, today on Cinderella Wines is a perfect example.
Jay miller rates the 2007 Benjamin Romeo La Vina de Andres Romeo 95 points Wine Spectator gives it 93 points yet one says “Drink now through 2017” and the other “minimum of 6-8 years of cellaring and will be at its best from 2016 to 2037”.
Please explain how the 2 windows can have so little overlap.
I’ve often struggled with this as well, since I’ve had many wines that were supposed within their drinking windows, but they died early (MacPrice Myers, for example), versus those that you’d expect to be LONG gone yet they are completely fresh - could be 10 or more years outside the ‘drinking window’, and they seem like they could go another decade.
I think not tasting a bottle young and making up your own mind on ageability is a HUGE mistake. Hence I can never believe the posts saying “bought a case, won’t touch for at least 5 years”.
Drinking windows are hit or miss and depend on the individual’s preferences. A variation of this that I find problematic is when I read TNs that state that a wine is at peak, especially when it is a younger wine (3-6 years old). I generally disregard these recommendations realizing over time that many like wines in their infancy. Though I consider my cellar to be fairly young (some older pinots from the 80s and 90s, burgundy & new world pinot in the 00s, rieslings, cabs and cdp from late 90s to early/mid 00s, new world rhone varietals from the 00s, etc.) I’ve rarely opened a bottle that was over the hill (only bottle this year was the 1997 Pine Ridge Howell Mountain cab). Your preferences and tasting wine over time is the only barometer that matters.
Trying to tell someone when they will enjoy the wine the most is, well, like trying to tell someone a wine tastes like 93 pts instead of 92…it’s silly…
True Matt, but a bit off point. The question really is, will a wine improve with age and if so, what would be the optimum drinking window? A very reasonable question for most “collectors” to ask.
The issue of aging presumes that the buyer/drinker is interested in something more than a “primary” experience, (i.e.: a predominantly fruit driven wine typically consumed a few years from vintage). If one is interested in secondary (or tertiary depending on your defintions) experience, when would be the best time to open a given bottle?..or should one not waste the money, time and space but just drink it young?
For the most part, I agree that most drinking window guesses are highly speculative, unless a given wine has a considerable track record without too much variation in winemaking. I’ve had a number of cheap low brow wines that were aged for 20 or 30 years (most accidentally) and were lovely…and ofcourse a number of high end wines that turned in to plonk. There are plenty of tales of heady alcoholic wines that were expected to deteriorate (as many do) but survived some appreciable aging to show beautifully. My belief is that even the most experienced palates will be challenged to guess an accurate drinking window when they’re not familiar with a particular wine, style or track record. YMMV!
The answer is simple. Critics are taking speculative guesses. They’re like weather men, but with zero scientific or modeling tools to help project. And like weather men, there is no accountability even if they’re mostly wrong.
I’ll add what I just wrote elsewhere:
I suspect there’s a fundamental difference in how scientists view wine aging and how critics do. To a critic, a wine is a deterministic system bound to evolve following a certain curve of evolution and peaking within an objectively determined window. To a scientist, a wine in bottle is fundamentally a chaotic system dependent on (initial) conditions such as quality of cork, microbial stability, residual sugars, ability to buffer against oxidation via phenols and sulfites as well as the bottle’s provenance and specific storage temperature. I know which picture is more accurate, and let’s just say there’s an Ashton Kutcher movie vaguely named upon a pop-sci idea derived from the correct model. No, Dude Where’s My Car is not the answer even if it’s about as logical as the purely deterministic picture.
But shouldn’t 2 (quality)professional critic be able to use growing season, winemaker history/style and a hundred other things and come up windows that overlap more? Could an experienced winemaker like Ric Forman do better?
Using your weather analogy my Great grandfather was the most accurate weatherman anyone knew with zero scientific or modeling tools but after 60 years of farming he somehow just knew.
I have noticed that WS is usually out to lunch re: drinking window. A couple of their critics (well, one now that Js has retired) gave realistic windows. But mostly they give very short timelines, often well before the tannins or acids will fully resolve.
Matt Kramer has always had an interesting take on this. He originally suggested that, for most ageworthy wines, you should never buy less than a case. (As prices escalated, he revised that to 6 bottles, and today, I imagine that he is down to 3 bottles, no 2009 first-growth Bordeaux included.) Anyway, it is not so hard to come up with reliable “rule of thumb” drinking windows. I think that most people would agree that there is no risk in waiting 10 years before opening your first Bordeaux, Cabernet Sauvignon, Brunello, Barolo, Barbaresco, grand cru red Burgundy, most sweet wines and quality German Rieslings, and no doubt other wines as well. (If a given wine of any of those types has the reputation of being an early drinker, that information usually surfaces in tasting notes, and you can take such wines off of the ageworthy table.) It is also not that difficult to scan the available wine literature to determine the average lifespan of any wine that you like, and another truth is that most wines from lesser vintages tend to be drinkable much earlier than the best vintages of the same wine. Kramer would have you try the wine outside of the certain infanticide window, and then make your own determination as to drinkability. He then proposes that, based upon what you determine, you decide whether the wine is suitably drinkable for your palate or, if not, when you plan to open the next bottle. You risk drinking a few bottles that give less than optimum pleasure, but you also learn firsthand how a given critic’s proposed drinking window lines up with your expectations.
The fatal flaw here is, of course, budgetary and space limitations upon how much wine you can buy and store. And none of us could be blamed for wanting a single bottle of La Tache from a great vintage more than multiple cases of premier cru Burgundies. I suspect that Kramer would always recommend that we go with the multiple cases…
Have I followed this strategy personally? Hell, no. I have done it with Barolos and certain other Piemontese wines, but not with , say, Leroy grand crus. And yes, I have popped a couple of the latter that remained deaf, dumb and blind, and did not play a mean pinball!
I am sure that you are right, but the quote has a Yogi Berra feeling to it. I think that Yogi said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” And, of course, the last word on drinking windows: “It ain’t over 'til it’s over.” But then again, maybe the problem is that wine is ninety percent mental, and the other half is physical!
Ridge states a drinking window on their labels, which I have always interpreted as conservative and leading to early drinking. With our cellar conditions, I usually start drinking them at or past the end of Draper’s window.
I agree, there’s no substitute for experience. There’s a certain pattern recognition skill folks develop, whether it’s storm systems or wine evolution. Certain qualities, producers and vintage characteristics correlate with aging. But for every rule there are dozens of exceptions. And for every producer with continuity of style and techniques, there are dozens that are either too new or have changed style and technique recently.
In other words, the majority of wines out there have no pattern to recognize. So critics are literally just tasting the wine, then guessing.
All projected drinking windows are BS, and it’s interesting that nobody ever seems to get held accountable when their projections turn out to have been totally wrong. They just keep right on BS’ing.