Some Truths About Wine

Questions of decanting, aging and the necessity of visiting the place where the wine is made.

Matt Kramer
Posted: June 1, 2010
Excerpt from WineSpectator.com

“Nearly all wines are better if decanted. Now, this is a truth that I have tested innumerable times over the decades with just about every wine type you can think of.

So why the qualifier “nearly”? Because I have yet to test it with sparkling wines. I’m no great fancier of bubbly, and therefore prefer to get it out of the way as quickly as possible in order to get to “real” wine. I do know Champagne fanciers who assert that decanting does, indeed, serve the cause of sparkling wine.

That caveat aside, I’m prepared to say that one of the truths of wine is that pretty much all wines, red or white, young or old, are better if decanted. Mind you, I’m not talking here about how long the wine should remain exposed to air in a decanter; that seems pretentious and overly prescriptive. Just pour the wine into the decanter, exposing it to some air in the process, and serve it when you like. I’ve yet to see a wine suffer for this, and I’ve seen an awful lot of wines be the better for it. Really, you can’t lose.

Most fine wines are at their best with 10 years of age. Like all truths, this is not an exactitude so much as it is reliably true for most wines most of the time. (When Voltaire famously said, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” it was for just this sort of thing. You can’t let a demand for absolute perfection be the enemy of what’s generally good and true.)

You will almost never go wrong serving any wine with 10 years of age on it. This of course assumes that the wine has been well stored in a cool place. Without that, all bets are off. But if well cellared, I’m hard-pressed to think of a fine wine that isn’t either showing its best or at least approaching its best after a decade of aging from the date of the vintage.

Does this mean that you shouldn’t drink any fine wine until it has hit the 10-year mark? Of course not. Rather, this truth suggests that never more than today, when so many wines are well made, there’s no hurry. And that after 10 years of age in a cool spot, nearly all fine wines can give you the best of both worlds: a still-youthful fruitiness and the greater dimensionality of flavor that only age can offer.

You can never understand a wine until you’ve seen where it’s grown. I mentioned this recently in a column about wines from Argentina. But it bears repeating, and expanding upon, if only because this particular truth has taken me a long time to recognize and accept.

No one disputes that it’s always a nice idea to visit where a wine comes from. But when I first became involved with wine I recoiled from the premise that I had to see the place in order to truly understand it. I felt, not unreasonably, that with enough tasting and reading and imagination, I could apprehend all that was worth knowing about, say, Volnay. I was wrong.

The key word, of course, is “understand.” It’s true that you can become expert, in the literal sense of that term, about a wine without ever having set foot on its originating site. At such a moment you are technically proficient, much like mastering a foreign language without ever actually going to its native land. It can be done.

Yet as anyone who has studied a foreign language can tell you, there’s no substitute for chatting up the locals. There’s nothing like hearing how it’s used, catching the subtle cadences and, above all, seeing how the language is inseparable from the culture.

So it is with wine. You can never understand a wine until you’ve seen where it’s grown. It’s why you can’t truly understand someone until you’ve met their family and visited where they were raised. It’s no different with wine-fine wine, anyway.”