Comparing vintages of the same wine

Let’s say you’re getting more into tasting and comparing, and you’re beyond “this one is a pinot and this one is a cab.” So you want to see if you can tell differences in vintages that you read about, one being great and the other being meh (apples to apples, talking about the same maker, same wine of course). Now if the wines are older this makes sense, like you could compare a 2003 with a 2004 and if they’ve been stored the same the differences should be due to the different vintage. But let’s say you’re looking at younger wines and you’re trying to compare a 2016 to 2017, or 2017 to 2018. How can you tell if the difference is due to the vintage, or simply the fact that the younger one simply hasn’t mellowed out its tannins yet? It seems there are now two variables, is it easy to separate? Or am I overthinking this and you shouldn’t even be experimenting with this stuff on cheaper wines, only higher end stuff? Maybe the cheaper stuff is so blended it’s not going to make any difference anyway.

I would argue its at least AS easy if not more easy to pick out the differences between younger wines vs older ones.

with younger wines you can immediately get a feel for whether the wine has riper fruit characters, rough tannins vs smooth ones, open vs closed down, high alcohol vs low. for example, comparing 17, 18, and 19 in Oregon, the 17 may likely be the least approachable and open now of the three because it was more classic cool weather Oregon. Same in Italy: 14 was the classic year, 15 and 16 were slightly warmer, so likely the 15s would be least tannic and boldest, most approachable fruit.

A lot off times, when you’re starting to talk about a bunch of wines that have really started to move into that peak range, I think you will actually see some of those characters a little less, because I picture that peak window as wines all moving towards a open, approachable, stripped down mean of a wine that shows that vineyard, producer, winemaker more than its tannin or young fruit.

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So it seems like what you’re saying is that the differences between young and not-so-young wines is more obvious, but those aren’t necessarily the qualities people talk about when they praise wine. For example, “too much tannin” vs. “not too much tannin”.

When the wines are quite young, I don’t feel the tannin usually stands in the way of evaluating the flavors and aromas of the wines. It could get tricky when the wines start to shut down. For example if you taste recent release Bordeaux or Burgundy from 2018 back to say 2014, you’re probably going to run into some 14/15/16 that are shutting down and harder to evaluate, whereas 17/18 will likely be mostly open.

If you were to compare 17 and 18 from either region, I think you would see significant differences that go well beyond the tannins, and there could be very different opinions on which vintage is better. 18 will be riper/richer and 17 more elegant.

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Dear Jeff,

When comparing wines from different vintages, you can focus on aromas and structure.

Aromas can help you say if one vintage has been warmer than another one with riper fruit aromas, for example cooked/jammy.
They can also help you make the difference between vintages with what’s called “tertiary aromas”. These aromas appear with evolution of the wine.
They’re generally fresh fruit developing into dried fruit with age for instance. They can also be specific to a grape variety: hazelnut in Chardonnay, petrol in Riesling, mushroom in Pinot Noir,…

Structure can also differ according to the vintage.
Again it can tell you if one vintage has been warmer than the other one with lower acidity and higher tannins & alcohol for example.
With age difference, the structure doesn’t really change: you keep the same levels of acidity, tannins, alcohol. However, they’ll become more integrated and balanced between them.

Hope this helps!

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