Hacks for evaluating current release wine

Quality wine is hard for me to evaluate when young. Worst case I’ll misjudge a wine and either buy when I shouldn’t or not buy when I should. I’ve found quality wine shows great early when I buy and ages great and that’s a winner. But sometimes its the opposite. I mostly buy multiple bottles of a wine.

Massive amounts of experience is the ultimate tool but I’m not even close. And for the most part all the benchmark wines I’ve bought are winners. Its more the new, unknown wines, that are hard to judge. Quality wines that will really evolve to be much different with some bottle age are not easy to figure out at first. Besides drinking a glass per day over 4 days, is there any other hacks?

BTW I do not have access to back vintages.

I’m a big fan of studying the oxidation curve, although there are a substantial number of WBers who think it’s a complete waste of time.

I’d also study the cork - keep pushing it in & pulling it back out as long as you’re studying the wine - see whether it’s a nice tight fit [or whether the cork slides in just a little too easily] - and also watch how quickly the cork crumbles and falls apart on you.

For [ostensibly] dry whites, if they show any residual sugar after the initial spoofulation wears off, then they’re immediately disqualified.

And these days, most reds I encounter just don’t seem to be built for the long haul - they’ve got way too much residual sugar and only the tiniest fraction of the tannin backbone they ought to have. [For Cabernet, I’d be steering clear of sweet purple/black fruit, and keying in on wines with a strong green streak & loamy brown synesthesia & enough tannins to pucker up your mouth as though you’d been sucking on a lemon.]

Also, be sure to do your sampling at dinner time, so you’ll know with certainty whether or not you’re tasting an excellent food wine.

Beyond, that, just trust your own judgement & instincts & preferences: If you study a table wine for an extended period of time, and decide that it tastes great to you [and matches really well with the food you eat at home], then to heck with what anybody else thinks of it.

PS: We usually try to push the sampling of table wine candidates out towards a full week [we put them back in the kitchen refrigerator overnight, down around 38F], and anything which starts smelling skanky in under a week is simply not going to make the cut.

For what I consider to be cellarable table wines, skanky better not be rearing its ugly head until out towards 10-day or 2-week mark.

PPS: You probably don’t get heat damaged wine up in Canada, but any young recently released wine, which seems tired or limp or suffering from the blues, is also gonna be jettisoned - I don’t care how big of a score the critics gave it - a young, recently released wine needs to have plenty of verve & tenacity & a relentlessly positive upbeat attitude about it.

Great stuff Nathan.

I have taken the cork casually in the past so thats a new one. The cork doesn’t factor in early on, but it does for the long haul. Food is always 100% part of the equation. Drinking duration of 1-2 days on avg but 4 or more on occasion. Its no coincidence that I’m finishing off a 1 week old 2004 Faurie Hermitage tonight. TBH this wine never made the cut day 1. It certainly evolved with oxidization and lost some of the edge I didnt like at first, but it is/was, at best an interesting St Joe syrah. Thanks for sharing your hacks and advice on approach.

Sometimes there are no “hacks” for life, you got to put in the hard work.

Which includes being at peace with having been wildly off base in your predictions of a wine’s future.

One thing which fascinates me is how table wines can “drop fruit”, and lose their color, and throw a ton of sediment, yet still be outstanding drinks just a few years later - you simply have to change gears & deploy those wines [in their new states] for entirely different purposes.

For instance, in powerful vintages, Jacques Puffeney used to make a Poulsard “M”, which was a burly intransigent fruit bomb upon first release [ideal for wintertime accompaniment to a hot juicy steak], but which, a few years later, would drop all of its fruit, and thereafter need to be served chilled, as an exceptionally elegant summertime rose, accompanying cold cuts in an outdoors setting [such as a veranda or a picnic on a blanket].

Right now we’re working through cases of a 2011 Pinotage and a 2016 Merlot which have been undergoing fascinating transformations in just the first year since we were introduced to them.

I’m in the same boat. I tend to buy multiple bottles and have very few back vintages.

While not a tactile hack, I use Cellartracker to research unfamiliar wines and producers. It has saved me from purchasing wines that are either not very good, are from a poor vintage, or do not align with my tastes. When I find a producer I like, I tend to repurchase.

The risk to this approach is that I’m less likely to try new things. That’s where wine boards like this come in, as well as my local wine tasting group.

There are no “hacks”. Looking at a wine over a few days doesn’t tell you anything about what it’s going to age like, or if it will age. And nobody can predict the future. If you’re looking at a wine with no history at all, the best approach is looking at the wine maker, the vineyard, the grapes, the vintage, etc. And then you make a best guess. And remember it’s only a guess.

Another option is to ask for advice from people who like the same wines you like and have more experience. Still no guarantee but might improve your odds.

Ultimately I agree with Greg: winemaker, vineyard, variety, vintage are all clues. But only clues.

Me as well. I read about Produtturi Barbaresco from WB and loved the first normale I tasted. Once I got in to it I used CT to explore crus and vintages. Now most of my inventory on CT is the Produtturi. But this is just a research/exploration approach, not a evaluation tasting hack. But combine both research and extensive tasting, good results happen.

That is surprising to read. I don’t agree you cant eval a wines future early on, but might one day I’ll change my mind.

After a few decades, I can’t. One of the world’s greatest wine makers, a guy named Mariano Garcia, who for decades has made wine that ages for decades, wouldn’t predict the evolution of one of his wines when I asked him. He had hopes, not predictions. Evolution Maybe you’ll discover something the rest of us don’t know. I hope you do. No joke - that would be a brilliant contribution to the world of wine. And changes over a few days has nothing to do with ageability.

The premise of this thread seems to imply that aged wine tastes superior to young wine. For me, if it’s delicious while young, I have no issue with buying, opening, and drinking it regularly, and will usually relegate only a couple of bottles to age mostly for purposes of education and curiosity.

Otherwise, I have to agree with Greg. Following a wine over the course of days is of little utility, and any longer than 3-4 days speaks more to self-restraint than any insight to an aging curve. See the number of vintages that are reviewed and rated as stellar while young but are rendered undrinkable with age, versus vintages that are panned in their youth but produce startling wines with age. It’s a crapshoot, but ultimately one that can be helpfully informed by winemaker, vineyard, variety, etc.

I don’t use the glass a day for four days.

My basic technique for Bordeaux or other reds based on Atlantic varietals is to pull the cork, drink an ounce, and revisit 24 hours later, finishing the bottle over the course of an evening. The second taste show some of the potential development, IMO most of the rest expresses itself over the next ~4 hours.

Discovered this in early 1973 when Myron bequeathed me a case of 1970 Bordeaux 2nds as he moved to Alaska, cautioning me not to touch them for 10 years. 10 hours later, I pulled a cork, gagged down a glass and wondered what was wrong. Left the bottle open on the kitchen counter of the group house, it was still there the next evening. And it was magical. I think this works for any high level Cab or Merlot based wine.

Dan Kravitz

Is that how you think or feel across the board of all wine you drink? I have had some wine decline with age and I regret not drinking earlier. Some wine does taste great when young and then may improve more or decline with time. The premise was not that all wine tastes better with age. Some of my wine does not age well and is more enjoyable when young. And some does taste so much better with 10 years or more on it and is undrinkable young.

One thing for sure is you can’t hack a newly released wine tasting experience to mimic what it will be like in 10 years. The evolution of secondary and tertiary characteristics can’t be fast tracked. And it looks like you can’t evaluate how long a wine will live for by drinking a new release over 4 days. It will oxidize and change but it won’t tell you much I guess. I’ll just go back to using known drinking windows and my own experience. Oh wait, Dan Kravitz just posted something that has me rethinking things again!

to Will Vetzi,

I like young wines, especially if they are not impenetrably tannic. But most of my greatest wine experiences have been wines with secondary characteristics, a subtlety and length that simply does not happen any other way. Of course I’m old, but I noticed this when I was young and my tastes have not changed much. I still buy Bordeaux futures if I think them worth it and if I can afford them. If I don’t live to drink them, other people will. The last vintages I bought in any quantity were 2000 and 2005; some of them are starting to show well and I’ll wait on most of them. I own some 2015s and 2016s, mostly at the high Cru Bourgeois and basic GCC level, but except for entry-level wines, I do not plan to open them any time soon.

In the mid-70’s I enjoyed a half gallon (jug handle, screw cap) of Foppiano Petite Sirah so much that I bought a case to lay down for 10 years. It evolved from fine to spectacular, I drank the six half gallons ten years later, over less than a month, inviting everybody I knew who liked wine over to enjoy them. Of course YMMV, and I am not much of a fan of tertiary character, when too often something that was great just tastes old.

Dan Kravitz

Again, in my experience, if a young wine goes skanky on you within a week, then it is not built for the ages.

Similarly, if, after a few days, when all the spoofulation wears off, you’re staring down a substantially different [i.e. worse] drink than what you had encountered upon first opening, then buyer beware.

If a young wine does not have a [core] strength of character which it can retain for a full week, then I would not be cellaring it.

Of course, balance is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, but that has to be the single most important factor for extended aging.

The other point is not to underestimate recently bottled wines that are tightly wound and a bit shy. I remember tasting some of Olivier Lamy’s wines from barrel as a student and thinking that they were a bit timid and lacking a bit of stuffing: those same vintages today are singing, and I am fortunate that I have been able to purchase some subsequently to remedy my former mistake. I now regard the qualities I found hard to read in Lamy’s wines as a student as positive attributes that I actively seek out in young white Burgundies built for the cellar.

A concomitant point is that demonstrative, immediate and front-loaded wines, especially if they are all about sweet, sun-kissed fruit, can very quickly crash and burn in a few years. I’m thinking of a lot of recent Southern Rhône wines, many 2015 Beaujolais, plenty of California Cabernet and Pinot Noir.

At least in the context of classic French wine regions, it’s clearly a mistake to think that wines need to taste actively nasty when they’re young; but equally, the notion that great wines have to be great to drink immediately doesn’t convince me. If coarse, mouth-puckering tannins are undesirable, a little structural asperity is no bad thing in a wine that will gain in complexity over the course of 50 years; nor is a firm spine of acidity. I would be much more wary of fat, unctuous, sweet fruit underpinned by no discernible structure than I would a bit of grip and cut.

You neglected to mention the modern, consultant-driven Bordeaux, especially almost the entire lot from St Em.

Best hack - a proven track record. It’s far easier to predict future greatness, if the previous releases showed this.

Even if you’ve not tasted that label (or indeed neither have others because it’s a new label) comparisons are very useful. e.g. taste a Hunter Valley Semillon and find it’s somewhat neutral and acidic… and those that know the wines will feel rather more optimistic than if it were complex and delicious already.

Without that track record (or if the producer drastically changes approach, or if the vintage is significantly atypical), then it’s much harder.
It’s certainly important to consider structure e.g. acidity, tannins, but also think about the rest of the texture / mouthfeel. Conversely wines that seem to lack acidity would be a concern for ageing.

The less I have to go on, the less confidence I place in predictions e.g. where I’ve little else to go on, I’m simply looking to decide short, medium, or long term cellaring. Not attempting to put a tight drinking window on it.