Or, to put it another way, do inexpensive wines improve more per dollar of purchase price as they age than expensive wines? I have recently opened a number of 12-16 year old wines that I bought 10 years ago when I was more price resistant than I am now. I have been pleasantly surprised by how they have developed. In terms of the amount of enjoyment they deliver, they are closer to the aged higher end wines than I would have expected. There are always exceptions, and I don’t think I would get the same effect from a gallon of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, but I have had it happen with an 8 year old bottle of entry level Borsao that cost me about $4.50.
It depends
I doubt in such a simple rule - it really does depend on the wine.
e.g. some (somewhat pricey) fruit bombs can be a hoot when young, but often just lose that verve. Hunter Semillon can be acidic and neutral when young, but really blossom with age. Whilst good nebbiolo seems to follow more closely the price => longevity expectation.
There is though a mental element to it, that we subconsciously downgrade a cheaper wine, so when it shines with age, we applaud it with even more gusto. Expectations are that much higher with a pricey wine.
There may also be an element of good honest (but simple) ageworthy wines aren’t as valued as they could or should be. It’s easier to see how glossier wines can charge a higher dollar.
regards
Ian
It’s nice when this happens, and since the connection between price and quality isn’t always so strong, shouldn’t be entirely surprising.
I regularly enjoy nebbiolos which are 30+ years old and which were very ordinary when they went into the bottle. Although they certainly don’t measure up to the few far more exalted examples I have had of similarly-aged red wines, I find them delicious and a lovely adventure for a surprisingly small tariff.
If you can locate some well-stored bottles of the proper grapes (nebbiolo, tempranillo, petite syrah, cabernet sauvignon…I am sure there are many others), by all means give them a try; much will depend on your personal taste.
+1
Lots of cru bourgeois Bordeaux ages well. So does Guigal Cotes du Rhone (which has a lot of syrah). I haven’t tried it with nebbiolo, but I would expect the same.
Acid is esssential to aging. As you say, Ian, many are meant to be drunk fruity and young and don’t have the structure of acid or tannin to sustain them long enough to evolve.
It depends. Champagne, Bordeaux and Piedmonte yes. Burgundy, Rhone and Riesling = huge hits and huge misses.
I’ve recently been enjoying some 14-15 year old Syrahs that were priced originally around $20. Today I’d put them up against wines 3 or 4 times that price.
Well if I buy JJ Prum and Muller Spatlesen, and age them 15 years or so, I find they both improve to the same absolute degree.
Hence the Prum must improve 3-4 times better per dollar
Jay,
Yes, I think that as you age, your enjoyment of a wine is less likely to be influenced by how much you paid for it.
Oh, that’s not what you were asking… 
Ben
Well Jay, from an anthropomorphic perspective, you couldn’t have been that expensive in your youth and yet you’ve aged quite handsomely. So per dollar of purchase price have you improved more than a more expensive model of you? I would imagine the answer is yes.
Of course, with age comes wisdom and you know there’s little correlation between price and enjoyment. In fact, I’m more likely to enjoy a cheaper wine than an expensive wine in most cases. Maybe it’s just me, but if the wine is really expensive, I analyze it a bit more critically. Maybe that’s a different thread though. But I’m really happy when a cheaper wine develops into something complex and delicious.
And the absence of oak.
If a young wine sees lots of new oak in barrel, then be prepared to drink an Eau de Coconut Suntan Lotion when you open it 15 years later.
Also, for the lesser varietals, be prepared for a wine which has dropped all of its fruit over the years.
Poulsard is a really good example of this - after eight or ten years in the cellar, you need to chill it and serve it as a Rose.
I think intelligence and knowledge reduce the correlation between price and enjoyment more than anything else. Knowing yourself, what you enjoy and what will age.
This has always been my big problem with the younger guys [or younger gals for that matter] who purport to be professional critics.
It seems like nobody under about the age of 65 [with at least a 40 year history of serious winetasting] has any business issuing professional for-profit opinions as to whether or not a certain style of winemaking [made from a certain varietal from a certain kind of terroir and a certain kind of vintage and bottled with a certain kind of enclosure] might or might not improve with cellaring, much less when the apogee of its drinking window might [or might not] occur.
A few years ago, Schildknecht was honest enough to say that he had given up trying to predict drinking windows.
And apparently Steiman has been very honest in [at least implicitly] acknowledging that his initial scores didn’t hold up to the test of time when it came to his vintage retrospectives.
Another ridiculous oversimplification from Mr. Smyth.
That being said, many “humble” wines will age and improve for years. It is a bit of a crap shoot, but probably no worse than white burg premox roulette and much less expensive.
Glad to know there’s some hope for all those “best deal of the year” I bought from Garigste that have been (and likely will keep sitting) in my cellar…
Data please.
I don’t mean to be an asshole (yes, it comes naturally), but I have heard this before, as well as “wines age on their tannins” and I have never seen any data or scientific explanation to support either. And it seems hard to reconcile with the monumental low acid vintages in bdx like 1947. So while it would be enormously helpful to be able to isolate the components of a wine that promise long term aging, I am not sure I have seen enough reliable work done to convince me that we know.
Again, data please. It would be hard for me to disagree more. In my experience, very well-aged riojas are a rather emphatic example that this isn’t true. Tons of oak, tons of aging potential.
But Neal, you need to be a multi-gazillionaire to afford the good ones.
I think it could be true that lesser wines that are highly oaked are at risk to age poorly, but it’s certainly not true of great wines. Most of the classic great wines (1st Growth Bdx, Yquem, DRC, Rousseau, etc.) are heavily oaked and they age magnificently.
You guys should saunter on over to this here thread, and have a gander at what happens to big fat soft plump critic-pleasing stews when they drop their fruit and reveal What Lies Beneath:
[u]TN: 2003 Hermitage horror-zontal with six “wines”[/u]
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