Predicting how a wine will develop.

I am conducting an “experiment” with the 2015 Chateau Capbern that I picked up at the local Costco recently. Opened and decanted about one hour ago, the plan is to take smallish tastes every hour or so for a few hours. Might hold on to the bottle for tomorrow (and beyond) or have a glass with dinner if it becomes enjoyable. What am I looking for? I am generally clueless, but hoping to see some development of flavor and diminishing of the harshness upon opening (tannin?) and to use this as a proxy for the potential of the wine to develop into a “better” wine over time. Is this foolish?
How do those of you more experienced than me go about a first hand assessment of a wine’s future? I read reviews but opinions are all over the place - how can a reviewer come to the conclusion “best from 2025”? What should I be paying attention to as I drink this wine? How do you do it yourself? Probably dependent on what kind of wine, so what do you suggest for this particular wine. Not an expensive wine, but is considered a “decent” wine from a “good” vintage. Not so much interested in your opinion of this wine; interested in how you would go about predicting its future development. Thanks.

Personally, I don’t think that there is all that much scientific knowledge to be gained doing this, and you can only extrapolate to your next bottle of the same wine. In other words, if you like it best after 4 hours of air time, that’s what I would do the next time you open one. I think using this method to try to determine how long a bottle could age, and what it might develop into with time is something few if any people can do reliably, including professional critics. I think the ageworthiness is better predicted by past vintages, assuming there hasn’t been a major stylistic change.

Just trust your palate. Drink when you want. Try and learn from each bottle.

Agree. I am not sold that drinking over a course of multiple hours or days tells you anything about how a wine will age over years in am anaerobic process. I know others will disagree.

And of course there’s bottle to bottle variation to deal with . . .

Jim - what everyone else said.

" I read reviews but opinions are all over the place - how can a reviewer come to the conclusion “best from 2025”?"

Only based on their experience with that or similar wines over the years. The wine maker can tell you what he hopes for, and if he or she has made wine for 40 years, they’d have a lot to go on, but reviewers will tell you their best guess based on other things they’ve tried. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth anything, but it’s like investing in stocks. Jim Cramer tells you loudly that a particular stock is going to triple in a year. Then you might want to check out how much of his own money does he sink into it.

Agree with what Chuck and the others have said. But how can you tell if a bottle you are staring at right now will develop and blossom or simply be the same wine and slowly fade? You don’t always know, nor do critics who put drinking windows on their reviews. Wine can confound like that. There are things to look for, like structure, fruit, tannin, acidity…but these by themselves will tell you nothing. Look over the thread on Beaujolais and Clive Coates; he thinks they cannot age, but evidence suggests that they do. Here is where personal opinion and your own tastes come into play, and experience, and producers who have the experience of their own wines (who should know them best).

I opened a ‘06 Syrah last night that was gorgeous. I opened a ‘10 from the same region a few weeks ago that felt over the hill. I think somebody once said wine is like a box of chocolates…

Thanks for the opinions. Here is what I am taking away from the comments:
• Come on man! Did you really think decanting a wine was going to tell you anything about that wine’s aging potential?
• Forecasting a wine’s development is difficult stuff. The more experienced you are with the specific wine or that “type” of wine (the winemaker, someone who has bought and aged these wines , etc, ) the better you might be at it.
• As in many fields where knowing is not easily verified, people will pretend to know, or give “expert” advice when they are just really making a SWAG. “The Emperor has no clothes” conclusion sometimes applies to wine experts and reviewers (or more kindly (and to mix metaphors), they can get a little “too far out over their skis”).
• FWIW, the results of my naïve “experiment” with 2015 Chateau Capbern. Very harsh and tannic upon opening. Slight but definite improvement in flavor and decrease in harshness over a four hour period in an open decanter. My wife and I had a glass with dinner at the end of the decant and my wife actually liked it. I thought it was better with food than by itself also. I put the remaining wine back in the bottle, vacu-vin’d and had a glass on day 2 and a glass on day 3. “Better” on day 2 and better still on day 3. Fruit became increasingly evident, tannins almost disappeared. Very pleasant day 3
• I plan to have the final glass of this wine (the best glass ?!) later this evening while watching the Red Sox eliminate the Yankees.

-Jim

My own views are:

• If you’ve had some experience tracking wines over many years to see how they evolve, and you know something about the type of wine or (better yet) the producer, you can make some educated guesses about how the wine may age. If it’s tight as nails at first, but fleshes out and gets fruitier over a few hours or overnight (refrigerated), that may tell you that the wine is better balanced that you might have guessed at first. And, conversely, if it oxidizes rapidly or cracks up in some other way, or starts to develop some vinegar hints (that can happen with Rhones, particularly from grenache), that’s not a good omen.

• Even informed estimates of optimal drinking window are still guess work. Plus, it’s very much a matter of preference where along the maturity curve you like your wines. Do you like them with some remaining tannin, or when the tannins have dropped away? Do you like a lot of secondary aromas, or do you find that all old wines taste too much alike after a point and prefer them before they’re entirely dominated by secondary elements?

I’ve never come across a critic whose estimates were useful, frankly. Personally, though, I very often taste wines and say, “I’ll wait three years [or five or ten years] to open my next bottle.” I can’t pinpoint the perfect moment, but I can make some useful estimates of how long to leave the remaining bottles buried.

• With a modestly priced wine like Ch. Capbern, I wouldn’t expect it to be better in 15 or 20 years than it is in 5 or 10. Most wines at that price point (it looks like it’s ~$30) aren’t made to age for long times. That said, it is predominantly cabernet in Bordeaux, which tends to age well, so I wouldn’t be surprised if improved for some years. Wines from St. Estephe are often quite stern when they’re young, so it wouldn’t surprise me if its evolution in the bottle was not unlike your experience after it was opened – tight and unfruity at first, but mellower with time.

Jim, thanks for posting your results. Based on your results, I would drink this wine on June 24, 2023. YMMV.

Don’t forget the biodynamic calendar - not all days are days

Jim,

We have threads about oxidation and threads about evaporation. In each, there are very detailed discussions, often with links to articles, addressing the evolution of wines over time against in the glass. In short, there is no tannic evolution over a day. There is little oxidation over an hour or two, though you show legitimate signs of oxidation affecting the wine as the hours tick by. Evaporation materially changes how the wine tastes and smells, and how one perceives tannins. In essence, the things around the tannins change their presentation with evaporation and the onset of oxidation, causing you to perceive tannins differently.

What appears fairly compelling in all of that is that there really is very little in common between evolution in a glass over an evening and evolution over 40 years in bottle. Totally different reactions, environments, results.

Your far better bet is to drink wines young, store them perfectly, and drink them older and see how the wine evolved. A day v 40 years test is like trying to judge what a hot bath will be like from getting crushed by a cold stream from a fire hose.

Ask Clive about how Beaujolais ages.

Ask Gilman how 2008 Bordeaux ages.

Ask RP how CdP ages . . .

I should add for clarity that tasting a serious wine a day or two after it was opened is not the same thing as tasting it with age. The flavors don’t change in the way they do with age. But it can give some insights into the balance of the wine (and hence it’s capacity to age gracefully) that might not be apparent on day 1. Tough, tannic wines can show more flesh/fruit. And it can also show up faults in wines that showed well on day 1 (e.g., initial burst of fruit fades without the concentration or structure needed for aging).

Drinking windows are generally quite stupid. Wines generally age a lot longer than most people think (provided the seal holds up). Wines don’t tend to age in a linear fashion.

This is demonstrably untrue - wines get older as the years go by

It’s the drinkers that don’t age in a linear fashion, Jeremy.