The Auswine Forum

Consistently over the last 25 years i have read and been told that much of australian red wine is good in the cellar for 5 or maybe 10 years and after this period it is over the hill and only good for vinegar. The other night all the learning- or most of it was thrown cleanly out with the trash as my wife and i opened a bottle of the 1988 coonawarra cabernet.Yes all the youthful robes of purple had been discarded but in its place were mouthsful of blackberries, cedary oak fine tannin and the memory of picking the wine up at the winery all those years ago. Agreed, bulk casks age on the floor of the wine store, But are we being sold a lemon when it comes to this range of wine? is it infanticide to drink so many wine so young? I only have an old linen cupboard - not a perfect cellar but this did not seem to hamper the aging so much. And the cork. What about metal over a period like this?
OOOOOOOOOOhhh and i still have one more! I hope it is as wynnderfull!!

Most of the wine I drink is from the last 15 years and cellared well. Most good Australian wine made for the long haul is good for at least 15-20 years I'd reckon. However I think u are describing one of Australia's freaks of nature and that is Wynns Coonawarra Cabernets. These wines have the ability to remain youthful for extraordinary periods of time. I remember drinking the complete vertical in the mid 80's and being blown away by the freshness of some of the wines approaching 30 years of age. If only all wine had this potential....

Firstly, Most wine writers tend to err on the side of caution, so when you read reviews that contain drinking windows they will often, in reality, be well short of potential.
Under cork, you will also find more variability. You might get some bottles of a particular wine that are stellar, others that are terrible, but most likely most of the bottles will sit somewhere between the two.
I think we will find with screw caps, that wines will last a lot longer, and with more consistency. I opened a 10 yr old Majella cabernet last night which was under screwcap and it still looked and tasted very young. It will easily go another 10 years

WARREN wrote:Consistently over the last 25 years i have read and been told that much of australian red wine is good in the cellar for 5 or maybe 10 years and after this period it is over the hill and only good for vinegar.

I'm sorry to say but you have been listening to all the wrong people. Len Evans and James Haliday could have told you otherwise. Fortunately you have now discovered that Australian wines can age a treat - better late than never.

The most important consideration for aging wines is storage. Most Australians don't have basements or cool rooms in which to store wine hence the wineries and wine writers tend to give shorter drinking windows to accommodate that fact. Corks are not a factor but rather a red herring - the many wines in the past that aged very well were all under cork. Today there are many more wineries producing good wines and therefore there should be even more excellent aged wines in the future. It would have happened even without the screw cap. A well stored wine under cork will be a far better wine than any poorly stored screw cap.

From my perspective it is not just Wynn's Coonawarra Cabernets, or any Coonawarra Cabernets for that matter, that makes for old bones. Wines from of other regions and varieties also make wines that age well - think of the Grange or Hill of Grace, both shiraz wines, or the classic Leonay rieslings, or the Hunter semillons. I know these are some of the classics but even more modest wines do very well - from my limited experience with the wines I've cellared the modest wines do very well.

Here are the more memorable wines from my cellar that were near to 20 years old and over that drank beautifully:

1982 Chateau Tahbilk Cabernet, Victoria
1975 Lindeman's 'Auburn Burgundy',
1990 Balgownie Chardonnay, Victoria (18 years)
1993 Mount Pleasant 'Maurice O'Shea', Hunter Valley
1982 Chateau Taltarni Cabernet, Victoria
1986 Lindeman's 'Pyrus'
1987 Sevenhill Vintage Port
1992 Chateau Tahbilk Marsanne, Victoria (19 years)

Good luck with your cellaring Warren..................................Mahmoud.

I've posted this in the June 2014 Tasting thread, but it is a great example of what Mahmoud was saying:

1984 Krondorf Cabernet Sauvignon Cabernet Franc.
2 Golds, 12 Silvers and 12 Bronze medals back when they were more than a marketing gimmick. I did not know much about the Krondorf Winery until reading the back label and seeing Grant Burge's name on the back. I hoped I had stumbled across something nice from a good wine maker in his younger days. The Cab Franc came from Langhorne Creek and the Cabernet Sauvignon from Coonawarra and McLaren Vale. The thing I love about these oldies is the alcohol levels-12.0%. Once the top of the capsule was removed I could see there was a pin size drop of dried wine at the edge of the cork. I took off the remainder of the capsule and the cork was stained all the way to the top for 365 degrees. The Ah-so managed to get about 1cm down the side of the cork and then pushed it into the bottle. It however had a grip on the cork that allowed me to pull it back to its original position. So I tried the two conventional corkscrews a the same time, and it managed to extract the cork out whole. It was absolutely saturated. Straight into the glass and its a very light red colour now, with a sizeable clear rim, and some browning. Initial bottle stink gave way in 5 minutes to some plummy fruit with cigar box and cedar on the nose. The palate mirrors the nose with lovely herbasious qualities, hints of mint, espresso and chocolate. The tannins left a while ago, but the acidity which is still in check, props the backend up nicely to give a lingering finish. This is not mind blowing stuff, but a great little wine that has stood up well given it's 30 years in bottle.

I don't know what it retailed for in the day, but it would only have been a few dollars at most. You probably would have had change from $2.