7 minute read
Young Reds vs Old Reds
Young Red Wines vs Old Red Wines: A Comparative Tasting
As that great 19th century wine writer, Miss Jane Austen said, at the start of her annual wine guide, Pride and Prejudice, 1813 edition, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a job in financial services, must be in want of a cellar full of old red wine.”
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WORDS BEN CANAIDER
How little anything has changed over the last 200 years.
Besides red wine’s status as being ‘old’, and besides being otherwise unprocurable, or having a cork in its neck, or a faded old label, or perhaps even its liquid measure expressed in fluid ounces (thereby making it a pre-decimalisation bottling), do old red wines have any real merit?
Two regulars at my Club’s Vinum Vitae table express opposing views. Yes. And no.
Let’s consider the ungenerous, cynical and far-too pragmatic view first, that being “no”.
Old red wine is faded, devoid of it’s primary and happy fruit flavours. Its gruff tannins of youth - that gave it such pucker and texture - have chemically bonded together - or ‘plated’ - and have fallen out of the solution (hence the crud in the bottom of the bottle, and the need to decant old bottles of red wine). Its colour is gone, its aromas are no longer of fruits or plants or Mother Earth, but more of old wardrobes and empty cigar boxes and mushroom compost passed its best-by date… Whatever secondary flavours and bouquet there might be fades fast, too, if indeed such qualities are still existent in the old bottle anyway. “Brown wine”: that’s what the “No” judge reckons. Dead, dreadful. All old bottles of red wine taste the same, he moans.
The “Yes” vote doesn’t see any of this at all. Of course not.
Verdancy, youthfulness, primary naivety - all of those fruit qualities we associate with young red wine - need time to mature. Time in the right cellar at the right temperature and humidity; time for a melding to occur; for gruff, brash, hurtful tannins to blend into the wine’s other qualities; time for the bouquet to develop and to knock down the ebullience of aroma. Time for secondary flavours to emerge and to harmonise. To drink the great red wines of the world when they are young is a form of infanticide. For hundreds of years - no!, thousands, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans and their Falernian wines that needed 100 years before they were ready - great red wines have needed great cellars and years of patience before they could be solemnly served and drunk, reminding those who imbibed how things once were and how things used to be…
Mmm… A conundrum. Does wine go off in the bottle, or does it ‘mature’, for the better?
With regard to some red wines, the latter answer is indubitably true. Yet the only way to realise this truth, and to taste it yourself, is with some forbearance, and a comparative tasting, which you hold in your own home at either 11am or 5pm.
All you need is a collection of six wines, from three winemakers. Two shiraz, two cabernets, and two vintage ports. Oh, and you need a computer, or a butler with a computer. Or an EA with an iPhone. Go online.
Find three young red wines. First, the cabernet of latest vintage, whether it be Bordeaux or Margaret River - whatever; but it must be reputable and of the latest vintage. Then buy a bottle of exactly the same wine from times passed. If you can get a bottle with 10 years age on it, do so. More and more wine merchants of the large liquor-chain type offer such ‘matured’ reds nowadays, so take advantage of their service. Repeat this process with the shiraz - although limit the age of that wine’s elderly example to 5 or so years. When it comes to the vintage port, contact the winery direct (if buying Australian VP) and ask if they have old stock available. Whenever I carry out this exercise with my myriad nieces or younger friends I like to compare a current Stanton & Killeen VP from the North East of Victoria (Australia’s greatest fortified wine region, and S&K its greatest exponent of VP) with a Stanton & Killeen at about 20 years of age. Indeed, I’m drinking a 1997 as I type and nothing suits a strong coffee at 11am any better.
Once the wines are assembled, and the young people upon whom you are going to conduct this experiment are at attention, proceed thusly:
Demonstrate all the bottles. Without moving the old bottles about too much (remember - the tannins deposited as crud…), show everyone that set A and set B and set C are examples of the same wine, old and young. I know this seems obvious, but I’m never more amazed by the power of obviousness on Now do some smoke-and-mirrors stuff: use a corkscrew or a two-pronged “Ah-So” cork extractor to remove the corks from the older wines. Decant the older wines into decanters,
labelled with a sticker or a non-permanent marker, A, B, and C. Label the bottles from which the wine has come ditto, so there’s no room for error. Sorry, I mean human-error. (Funny, isn’t it, how we have such phrases as ‘man-power’ and ‘man-hours’, but it’s always ‘human-error’? How inclusive...)
Take the screw caps of the younger examples of the wines and now pour the wines into three sets: the two shiraz wines side by side (youngest next to the older wine), the two cabernet, and then the three VPs. You can label the younger wines with lower case ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’ if you like, to make sure people don’t get mixed up, but, quite frankly, if one can’t see which is the older wine and which is the younger wine by the difference in colour alone you either need cleaner wine glasses, new light bulbs - or new friends.
Speaking of which, look. Look at the wines. This is the first step in awarding your tasting companions some confidence and learning. The young wine will be as brilliantly colourful and as full of lustre as the inside of Dracula’s after-dinner cape. The older wines will be, well, browner. Duller. They’ll look old and a bit murky perhaps. Old red wine. Young red wine. Just by sight your tasters will be able to deduce this. And they’ll feel supremely satisfied once they’ve learned this.
Now smell. This is a simple two-step process. Aroma versus bouquet. Aroma in wine is from nature. Fruit, flowers, vegetables, fresh herbs. Smells that are alive and heightened. In young cabernet, for instance, the aromas are mint, blackberry, cassis, berries. Young cabernet may also have a lick of oak’s influence, too: cedar, coconut, smoke, vanilla. In the older cabernet smell is driven not by primary aromas, but by secondary bouquet, which has developed during the wine’s bottle maturation. Earth, dustiness, mushrooms, cedar, leather, cigar boxes, tobacco, truffles...
And similarly the taste of the wine - principally its texture - has changed. Young cabernet is driven by that berry mintiness and - more importantly - by the gruffness of cabernet’s innate tannins. Tannins dry your mouth out - imagine sucking on a teabag… But as the wine matures the gruffness drops away a little; the wine is still textural, but it is no longer so furry and puckering to drinking.
Of course, the amazing thing about this comparison is that the older wine will always be reminiscent of it’s younger self, and this will come through in the comparative tasting. The mature wine echoing the bolder primary smells and flavours of the younger wine. If you can do no more than demonstrate to your tasters the difference between primary smells and flavours, and secondary smells and flavours, you’ll have done a good job. The shiraz comparison will be more subtle; but the VP comparison will be staggeringly effective. Young VP is all blood and concrete, whereas the older stuff becomes honeydew, the milk of Paradise…
Once the tasting is concluded, serve the party pies and the cheese course. And drink the wines. I’m always surprised how the young folk now drink the old wine first.
