I was recently extremely pleased when I opened a bottle of our Naiara Malbec Reserve 2006 to find that it had gone through an evolution. I had not tasted this wine for at least a year and attended a wedding this past weekend where this malbec was the featured red wine (the put it with a Mediterranean lamb dish – fantastic!).
So what was this wine like a year ago when I last tasted it? Much more rough, intense, and “young” feeling.
It is somewhat confusing to wine neophytes to use the words young, mature, or old when describing a wine, but if you think of wine as a person, then it might make more sense.
If doing a wine tasting with young wines, they tend to be brash, harsh, unrefined and perhaps more difficult. If they are not (and still of a recent vintage), then they will tend to be simple. Much like young people! The young ones who are complex will become more refined and balanced as they age, and then when old will tend to have very specific and unusual flavors that tend to be not as friendly for the unsophisticated palate!
Yikes, how incredibly like the complexity of our elders, who have lived so long and seen so much that their opinions become palatable only for the very discerning.
This is also analogous to how people pick friends in different stages of life. When you are young you try to be friends with everyone, and with wine, you tend to pick low entry, easy to understand and consume wines (the simpler “drink young” wines). When you get to your 30s and 40s, your taste refines a bit, and you start to screen new people in your life more, narrow your scope, and become a little more complex. This is aking to drinking wines that are mid-range wines, with some age, complexity and refinement. And when you are old you rarely incorporate new people into your life as your interest level in this activity has died down, your opinions become etched in stone, your routine is everything. Just like that old wine bottle that has been lying there waiting to be drunk, its routine has been the same for the last several years
Related posts:
- Malbec, Torrontés and Interesting Varietals
- Why Do People Love Wine?
- Drinking Leftover Wine
- Evolved Wine, Evolution As It Relates to Wine
- Bird-Shit Bandits Strike Again in Buenos Aires
