Understanding the dumb phase and aging

[GregT]

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.

And another great quote from Seiber!

Saying you should wait 17 years sounds nice because nobody is going to double check him in 17 years to see if the wine is indeed better. Burt Williams used to say seven years is a good time to drink your Pinot Noir. But those are off the cuff remarks that don’t answer much, other than to say that those guys believed their wines would be better with a little time. They don’t really address the “dumb phase” at all, and they really are more about personal preferences. Some people say you should keep some Rieslings for years, but that doesn’t mean that the people who prefer them younger are wrong, just that they prefer different things.