| 12 March 2010
Educating yourself about wine has many advantages. For instance, it gives you one more reason to look down upon Australians. Also, learned discourse about wine is an excellent way to bore your relatives. But the most important benefit of memorizing the 1855 Bordeaux classification is that it’s naturally intimidating. I just have to mumble something about gravel soil types and my friends begin squirming like worms dangling from a hook. As that great lover of wine Emperor Caligula once said, “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.”
But there is one thing about wine that everybody dreads, and connoisseurs most of all: blind tastings. They are unavoidable in the wine world. Tasting blind is not merely the best way of assessing a bottle’s quality — it is a public ritual contrived to expose ignorance and shatter pride. Horror stories about these tastings are a particularly amusing sub-genre of wine writing. For instance, there is the tale of the tasting panel at the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris, whose members bickered throughout the proceedings about which samples were French and which American. More recently, a study of judges at the California State Fair’s prestigious wine competition found that only 10% of them gave the same wine the same rating when it was given to them blind on more than one occasion. Some judges failed a certain sample on one day, and the next day handed it a gold medal. Read more
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| 16 February 2010
I am usually vague and non-committal when posed the often asked, all-too-general question, “How long can wine age?” The all-too-general answer, “it depends.”But with the proliferation of “trunk-aging” (aging a wine as long as it takes to drive it from the wine store to your home), the question almost seems moot. The majority of all wines are consumed within 24 hours of purchase. This seems appropriate, as the majority of wines produced are meant to be consumed while they are young (within two years of their release).
There are wines, though, albeit a small percentage, that benefit from aging for a decade or more. The ideal result of aging certain red wines is the softening of hard tannins and the development of greater complexity and nuances. The factors that allow for aging are quite complex, but the general requirements are tannin, acidity, and fruit. The fuller a wine in all of these components, the better and longer it will age. Certain white wines and dessert wines can also benefit from several years in the cellar. Consistent storage temperature (ideally 55˚F) is always an essential factor.

