Passing the Sentence – How Long to Cellar?

Thank heavens the economy is on the up, or so the burgeoning wine cellars of certain medico friends of mine would suggest. Not only are Australians spending more than the statutory $10 on wine again, but there is indeed a renewed interest in cellaring wine and buying wine especially with this purpose in mind.

Firstly, why bother to cellar wine? If you can enjoy a wine now, what’s the value in keeping it for longer? Well, thanks to wines like the Mount Pleasant Elizabeth and the occasional re-releases of what are really little more than well-made but commercial big-company white wines such as Hardys Siegersdorf Rhine Riesling and Houghton White Burgundy, you can see for yourself how much they really do improve with age. The richness, complexity and character they acquire only confirms what exactly the best wines, white or red, have to offer with age, if only they are given the chance.

OK, so what wines do you buy to cellar? Sadly, most of us remain sadly unaware that white wines cellar just as well as reds. But whatever wine, red or white, you’re thinking of putting down, it must still have a few essential prerequisites beforehand.

Let’s begin with fruit flavour, which is essential in a young wine. It doesn’t just appear with age from nowhere. A tight, restrained young white burgundy or chardonnay, might display very delicate fruit, but if it’s not there at the start, or if surrounded on all sides by excessive and splintery oak, forget about cellaring it.

Acid and tannin are the most important wine preservatives, although most white wines are deliberately made without any tannin at all. Acid represents the finish of the taste, just as a full-stop completes a sentence. Acid also contributes to the life and freshness of many wines and without it a wine is likely to fall flat on its face after a year or two. Both acid and fruit are essential, then, even for sweet dessert wines as sauternes and auslesen, which are classic examples of cellaring whites. Their big, intense fruit may make the acid a little harder to find, especially with all that sugar, but look for it around your tongue after you swallow. These wines show dramatic changes after a few years.

Oak and tannin play an essential role in most red wines and oak-matured whites. Tannin is responsible for the astringency or ‘grip’ associated with red wine. It contributes to the wine’s backbone, palate length and even to its bouquet as the wine becomes particularly mature. Wines with deep colours and tannins tend to age for longer.

The most tannic wines to taste are those with medium-sized tannins – those young and developing red wines and vintage ports which can be expected to ‘soften out’ as time enables their tannins to polymerise. Therefore these are amongst the wines to consider cellaring.

However, consider carefully the wine’s balance between fruit, acid and tannin. If a wine is made with insufficient fruit character but with excessive tannin, by the time the tannin has softened out and the wine become more approachable, it may have entirely lost its fruit and become entirely worthless as a source of pleasure.

Similarly, if a wine is made with inadequate acid, the acid level may have dropped to such an extent that by the time the rest of the wine has become mature, i.e. its fruit and oak qualities have developed harmoniously and its tannin softened, its lack of acid will usually cause the palate to lack length and freshness. At this stage also, a wine’s colour may have dulled noticeably, its appearance becoming undesirably opaque and lacking brightness.

Although oak can dominate the flavour of recently-bottled wines, given time it can ease back and ‘marry’ with the fruit. However if a wine is cellared past its prime, the fruit and acid can fall away, leaving a thin, flavourless oaky wine without character or quality.

Australia is blessed with a group of indigenous white wines perfectly suited to cellaring. Our Rhine rieslings and un-wooded semillons, especially those from the Hunter Valley although many of the great low-yielding Hunter vineyards of the past have sadly been uprooted since they were not commercially viable have extraordinary track records in the cellar, as exemplified by the great wines of Lindemans and Leo Buring. The newer heavily-oaked style of Hunter Valley and Margaret River semillons could also prove to be a superb cellaring style.

Australian chardonnay is a matter of some conjecture, since it comes in two quite separate variants. Those chardonnays for mass production and sale, which in itself is not intended as a criticism of the wines, are generally made with maximum care to retain their primary fruit flavours, which are then bolstered with a rapid and sometimes heavy-handed oak treatment, more often than not extracted quickly and cheaply from oak shavings.

These cheaper wines are generally deep-coloured and deliberately short-lived, for their oak quickly dominates their fruit. Once their youthful freshness is lost, they fail to develop in harmony with the oak in the manner of a classic wine. Importantly, however, this is a very valid style of wine at which Australia happens to excel, offering a combination of quality and value that genuinely leads the world.

The other type of Australian chardonnay is that which either directly follows, or else is heading towards, the Burgundian style of white wine. This style is based less on primary fruit flavours, but more on the anticipated development of secondary bottle-aged complexity as the wine’s many components of flavour and texture derived from a myriad of traditional means such as barrel fermentation, skin and lees contact combine together in a way that is harmonious and complex. The winemaking risks are higher, but the results are worth it when they work out. These are wines to cellar, to watch, and which are empirically more expensive and satisfying than the more basic style of chardonnay.

An increasing number of these wines will find their way into future editions of this guide as their quality improves. Give them time, for their fashion of making is almost directly diametrically opposed to the philosophy of Australian winemaking as expounded from the ’50s to the ’80s.

There’s no point in cellaring any fortified wine apart from Vintage Ports, which you should treat as a red wine in your cellar. All the others do not improve in the bottle, and have been aged extensively prior to bottling in oak casks.

Finally, by leaving an opened bottle of the wine in question around for a couple of days, protected only by having its cork re-inserted, some indication can be gained of its cellaring potential. If off-flavours quickly appear, if the fruit soon disappears, or if the palate soon becomes short, the wine may not be such a good bet for keeping. Use this technique as a guide only.

Breakaway:

Some wines worth buying for the cellar:

Tyrrells Vat 1 Semillon
McWilliams Mount Pleasant Elizabeth
Rothbury Estate Semillon
Mitchelton Blackwood Park Riesling
Leo Buring Leonay Rhine Riesling
Delatite Riesling
Tim Knappstein Riesling
Bannockburn Chardonnay
Yeringberg Chardonnay
Tyrrells Vat 47 Chardonnay
Pipers Brook Chardonnay
Mountadam Chardonnay
Lillydale Vineyards Chardonnay
Henschke – any red wine
Chateau Tahbilk – any red wine
Penfolds Bin 389 Shiraz
Mount Langi Ghiran Shiraz
Grant Burge Shiraz
Rothbury Reserve Shiraz
D’Arenberg d’Arry’s Original Burgundy
Mount Mary Quintet
Penfolds Koonunga Hill
Leasingham Bin 56 Cabernet Malbec
Moss Wood Cabernet Sauvignon
Orlando St Hugo Cabernet Sauvignon
Seaview Cabernet Sauvignon
Seaview Cabernet Shiraz
Wynns Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon Please login to post comment