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Worth The Wait

Written By: Brian Freedman on Tuesday, June 19, 2007

The Benefits of Drinking Those Prized Older Bottles

This past weekend, I was reminded yet again why it pays to invest in a wine-preservation system, hold onto a few bottles, and wait until they've reached maturity to drink. This, of course, is one of the hardest parts of collecting wine - knowing that there are bottles in your cellar that won't be ready for years, and wondering the whole time what they'll be like when you finally do open them.

Will they be corked?

Will they have reached maturity or passed it?

Or will they, as the wines I enjoyed this past weekend, be absolutely gorgeous?

In all fairness, I usually don't drink these kinds of wines. I taste them, sure - and promptly spit them out, analyzing them from the moment they've been poured into my glass and staying as emotionally removed from the experience as possible. There's just no other way to objectively understand a wine.

But this past Sunday was the first Father's Day my family spent with my new nephew — he was born less than a month ago. And in order to give the day the gravitas it so richly deserved - and also in order the justify opening wines like those - we decided to go to the cellar and open up some of the good stuff.

Over the next several hours, we drank the Bollinger Grande Annee 1997, the Paradigm Cabernet Sauvignon Oakville 1998, and the Red Car Box Car Rose of Pinot Noir 2006 - three delicious, though very different, wines.

What was most interesting about those older wines was how different their routes to maturity had been. The Bollinger, for example, wasn't even disgorged until April of 2005, and I didn’t acquire it until this past year. The good folks up in Ay, in other words, had done the hard part for me, holding onto the bottle and giving it all the TLC it required.

The Paradigm, on the other hand, had been in the cellar for years, resting on a back shelf, mellowing out, developing all those fabulously funky characteristics that old cab of that caliber eventually shows. What amazes me most, though, is that it lasted that long - how many times, I wonder, had my father and I considered opening it up out of sheer curiosity and impatience?

This, I think, is the hardest part about laying down wines in your own cellar - the temptation is often too great to fight, and far too many bottles' period of development is cut short by impatient wine lovers.

But the wait was worth it in both cases: The Champagne just exploded with aromas of vanilla cream soda and toasted brioche, and the palate was astoundingly complex, showing both bright citrus and toasted marshmallow flavors. And the Paradigm found the perfect middle ground between Old World subtlety and elegance and new world stylishness. No bottle of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label or young Napa cabernet could ever have had those flavors: These wines were very much products of their time in the cellar.

No one, of course, could live on a diet of older wines alone, just as a wine regimen that only consisted only of younger wines would grow tiresome, too. But once in a while, when the time is right, a fabulous old bottle is a worthwhile and important treat - as a whole new generation of wine - lovers is discovering. It will remind you exactly why you hold onto those bottles for so long, putting off the return on your investment for years or decades, all in the hope that time will work its magic on the juice in the bottle.

Because when it does, the result is nothing short of magic.

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