Understanding the dumb phase and aging

[John_Morris]

And I don’t think you can really say with confidence that a particular wine will enter it at such and such date and exit at some other fixed date. At least I’ve never heard a single wine maker make predictions with that kind of confidence. It’s the wine drinkers that have the confidence to make those predictions.

Someone once quoted Gaston Huet, the great Vouvray wine producer, saying that you should wait 17 years for his wines to come around. That stuck with me due to its specificity.

Indeed, I quoted that person quoting Huet in a thread three years ago on this very topic. That discussion also contained this memorable comment on the same questions posed by the OP here:

I used to know the answer to this, but I’m going through a dumb phase right now. I will hopefully emerge from it in the future, but you never really know if or when.