The Auswine Forum

Interesting point has been raised on the Forum that cellaring wine is over rated. I for one see it as one of the more interesting facets of wine appreciation etc. With Most wine that i consume for the first time my early thoughts are always, will cellaring improve this wine. The art of selecting a wine that will cellar well is a game within itself, you are pitting yourself against mother nature and the winemaker, the winemaker may give you some guide as will the history of a particularly wine, mother nature by the type of vintage conditions that prevailed that year, the rest is up to your self.
Ones own idea of wether wine should be cellared comes through the good old school of hard knocks ( mine did ) Lots of tasting and getting the palate use to identifying the ingredients in a wine that cellaring will enhance,the experience of putting away bottles that soon fell over, tasting other peoples cellared wine and learning from their mistakes. Gee ive made the odd bad selection but at the same time made many more good ones, i remember the good bottles but never the bad ones, the bad ones are just part of the game and of course if the cellared wine doesn't equate to your tastes it can always be sold. As they say in wine circle's, 'what may be somebodies poison my very well be someones Else's joy'.

I don't think anyone plans to drink a wine past it best , but at times it does happen though misjudgment or if you are really lucky you are too busy drinking other wines in your cellar and haven't had time to get round to them all. I know a couple of people who are in that situation and i have offered to help them out, unfortunately all offers have been declined. Another way of ive know of avoiding bottles falling over is to occasionally inviting people into your cellar and have them select a wine thats ready for drinking, they bring with them a bottle that is ideal for cellaring as a replacement, which is great as there becomes no end to it all.

This of course leads to the great wine Dilemma, when do you stop cellaring ? I have no answer to that and i hope i never do.
I hope ive raise some interesting points with my view on cellaring, must be off as i just thought about a wine in my cellar thats achieved it prime drinking window and needs consuming.

Cheers
Geoffrey

Geoffrey,

Interesting topic. The easy and short answer to the subject question, in my house/cellar, a resounding NO. Every week I manage to drink several well-cellared reds that give me a great amount of satisfaction.

As you said, there are the ones that don't turn out like you expected, generally I send them off to auction, occasionally give some away to someone I think may like them more than me or may not care that it's a bit unbalanced or nearly dead.

I think my success rate is pretty good now, derived from lengthy experience and learning from past mistakes.

When to stop? I've achieved my aim to have about 10 years worth of reds stashed away in preparation for retirement, so I just need to buy at replacement quantities (or just less) from good vintages. If drop off the perch early then my partner (she's 11 yrs younger than I am) will have a decent cellar for the wake and some time thereafter. If I run out of money in retirement or we run out of wine she can take over the funding of the wine purchases.

I also reckon that it is one of the most pleasing things to do is bring out an old red that was young and raw and then watch it develop and evolve over time. It teaches you a lot about how wines change.

With many of the top reds they are also unapproachable at such a young age. Reds from great vintages (such as bin 707, jasper hill) really need 10 years bottle age (5 if your a red bigot to start to loosen up. Before that all you really get is a mouthful of raw fruit, and heaps and heaps of tannin.

Cheers
Anthony