Wine Ageing...

Enhance your Wine: Age it

While I had found a proper place for the wines, I was becoming acutely aware of how little I knew about them and decided to learn more. One of the new things I learned was that in addition to preservation, there is wine ageing too. You see, wines do age just like all living things. And this ageing produces all kinds of secondary flavors that enhance the taste of wine and make the wine lose its bite. Actually it was a bit embarrassing to find out that the ancient Greeks were much more aware of the importance of wine ageing than I was. “Given the vagaries of vinification, much Greek wine will not have lasted long, succumbing either to oxidation…or to spoilage due to inadequate storage, the risk of which was noted by Aristotle”. (The Oxford Companion to Wine by Jancis Robinson). Old wine was highly regarded by the Greeks so the process of ageing wines has been practiced since antiquity. Even the comic poets of ancient Greece had noted that men preferred old wine but young women… I wasn't about to break this practice.

Which wines you should age

Not all wines are created equal and not all wines improve with age. A good young wine aged properly will very probably become an even better one when it matures. A mediocre wine not only will not improve with age, it will almost certainly decline after several years. And then, there are wines--the vast majority of wines available in the market today--that are meant to be drank young. So, which wines do we choose to age? Well, before we can answer that question, we should understand a little more about what happens during the ageing process--of wines of course...