Totally fair point, but as you mentioned, the difficult part is that we never know if wine is in its dumb phase or not with certainty, until it gets out of the dumb phase a few or many years later (or it never does). I guess this probably reduce to a question of “how good are we to distinguish between a great wine in its dumb phase and wine that’s usually great but not so great this year”.
This is true if and only if one believes in someone else’s tasting experience as written, right? Like reading critics vertical tasting record, and then “yeah this wine seems to end up great year in and year out, so this bottle must be in a awkward stage”. For sure this may be right more often than not and could be the best one can do to predict in many case, but honestly, one can do this even without tasting wine so not really an educated guess imo.
Totally agreed. There are many CT notes that say something like “not really open and awkward right now, but this will be great in 5 years”, and I was wondering if I’m tasting wine wrong because they sound so confident and I’d be never so sure lol
Now we’re in the realm of personal preferences, which adds another layer of complexity. Over time, it becomes clear which friends, online posters, and critics have preferences similar to your own.
Someone with distinctly different preferences can be useful as well, as long as they’re consistent in their descriptions. A perfect example on WB are @Robert.A.Jr and @Jeff_Leve. Their palates are almost 180 degrees apart, but they are both accurate and reliable in their descriptions. When Jeff rates a young Bordeaux 99 points and describes it as ripe, chocolatey, and lush, Robert knows it’s not going to have the classic characteristics he cherishes.
Well I think it’s pretty safe to assume that there is a lot of overconfident posting that occurs!
That said, when you have experience and can judge the materials, it is often reasonable to assume broad strokes about whether the wine will improve or not.
But there’s so much wine out there. If I get a wine that I don’t enjoy, when in doubt, I usually err on the side of not buying more. Knowing full well that my experience may not have been representative of its potential. Which is fine, because there’s always more wine.
Also remember that for many, enjoying wine is in the ‘here and now’. If they experience a wine that is showing more tannin or acid that they are used to, their ‘knee jerk’ reaction might be to say ‘it needs more time’ rather than ‘I don’t like this style’ or something similar.
Love the subject - and how truly ‘subjective’ it is
I think a producer using the same vines would take a decade to really get a bead on this in-house. By then, there would be several kinds of vintage dealt with to begin to understand how vintage affects the aging potential. Overlay any winemaking evolutions the producer may have and it might take them another 5-10 years to really refine their sense of this. When talking many decades of vintages, we now introduce different humans into the equation whose decisions can vary enough to change the window a bit even if they are striving for a similar outcome.
Someone with knowledge of the producer track record and vintage proclivity could make a good stab at it. But in the absence of that, I think this is difficult to predict with high reliability.
Grapes possess a certain amount of oxygen appetite. Vintage character and ripeness level determine this at harvest. Processing at harvest/fermentation, aging and fiddling will all have affect on the oxygen appetite left at bottling. It’s the oxygen appetite at bottling that I think determines aging potential.
A wild card here is that any given producer with a long established track record could be swept up in the move to make more approachable wines when youthful. These get rewarded in the press and at the cash register, while their reputation for age-worthiness remains intact for some time, adding to the confusion of those trying to understand how young wines will develop based on their youthful presentation.
For known wines with known track records: I’d say “pretty good.”
For known wines with unknown/no track records: coin flip
For unknown/blind wines: coin flip
As alluded, the best wines with potential to age well are balanced with ripe fruit, healthy acidity, and ripe tannins. I must say I cherish well made wines that have aged well but there are plenty of misses too - and modern Bordeaux and for the most part modern Napa drink pretty well young which changes the algorithm. Moreover, the flavor profile of aged wines is something with which I am not completely enamored so sometimes it seems sitting on a bottle for 20 plus years leaves me feeling that the juice is not worth the squeeze. For those who inherited cellars of aged wine or are ITB and have an opportunity to try lots of aged wine I envy you - buying and cellaring for decades is a bit more hit or miss!
In my experience, for 20+ year old aged Bordeaux, buying at release and cellaring myself has a higher hit rate than buying pre-aged wines on the secondary market. That’s based on enough experience to have a pretty good batting average with known wines.
I have also had pretty good luck on the secondary market, but provenance risk is an issue.
Then again, I do prefer aged wine, especially aged Bordeaux. That may explain our different experiences.
I got good at this with Monte Bello. Local winery. Many local fans of the winery, some of whom have been customers since the '60s. Annual events at the winery tasting barrel samples, the current release and library releases. Vertical tastings, which are of course different vintages, but quite a range of maturity levels. Then also following many specific vintages over the years. That gave a fairly comprehensive view of the typical aging curve and how it varies by vintage. Of course that’s just one wine, and there are occasional anomalous vintages you still have no basis to make an accurate prediction. I mean, Ridge did that with the '86. They guessed it wouldn’t be a long ager and wasn’t worth retaining stock in their library, but it did come around and became a highly enjoyable younger drinker.
Some of that knowledge translates to some other wines. Of course, other experience with other wines informed me, too. Metrics that work well for classically made wines from historic regions can very much not translate to other wines. You have to remain aware and humble. It’s fine to have no confidence with some wines, even some novel vintages of a wine you know well.
Back when I wrote notes regularly I used a lot of notations to help inform my confidence. That was partially informed by some critics. Of course, using words is primary, then reflected in your drinking window and rating. It’s not only okay, but best to be forward when you have no clue with a given wine. My notations included parentheses for predictive guesses for wines that weren’t ready. Some wines show well now and may or may not greatly improve. Some show well now, but you are confident they’ll greatly improve. Some wines don’t show well now, but you’re confident with what’s there that they’ll come around to a certain level. Some wines don’t show well now, have some promising characteristics, but you really just don’t know if they’ll come around or how well, if they do. Some wines may have characteristics you don’t like and don’t feel will resolve. Some characteristics don’t typically resolve, and only become more relatively prominent over time.
