What is the point of age?

[Gerhard_P]

@J a y H a c k

@Gerhard P.

@Merrill Lindquist

I did not read this thread. Every time I see the thread title, I think to myself that it is to humiliate women who were once considered attractive. Age. Yeah.

I really don´t get it.

Not one second in this thread I thought that anything would/could concern women and their age … far less anything humiliating.
. . .

ALERT- massive thread drift.

It is what we in the United States call a joke. I understand that you Europeans have a lot of trouble with the concept. After all, you all thought Jerry Lewis was funny.

Merrill was jokingly saying that the purpose of age (as in people getting older) is to make women who were once beautiful and are now PERCEIVED BY SOME as no longer so due to the adverse effects of aged humiliated by the ALLEGED downward slope of their appearance.

BUT once you have to explain a joke, it is no longer funny, so we’re just going to have to work on your sense of humor.

PS - I am 65 years old and I know many women my age who have improved with it.

Jay,
I agree with your last sentence !

If this posting was only a joke - I beg your pardon if I didn´t get it … it might have to do more with my English (not my mothertongue) than with my sense of humor … sorry, my fault.

However … there are smileys to clear the deeper meaning … otherwise foreign readers (only foreign ?) might get misled …

[Claus_Jeppesen]

The conclusion must be:
There is no point in not letting ageworthy wines age.

[Mike_Francisco]

@Jonathan Loesberg

@Mike Francisco

I did not say that, no great wines can go more then 50 years and still hold on to their character, what I said was that the vast majority don’t.

If this is what you are saying, this whole argument evaporates. No one is saying that most wines are meant even to age at all. Virtually everyone begins with the presumption that we are talking about the relatively small handful of wines that do reward aging.

Jonathan,
Just want to be clear here, I am say that even when talking about Great age worthy red wine, the subset that have something left at 50 and beyond is tiny.

[Mike_Francisco]

@Claus Jeppesen

The conclusion must be:
There is no point in not letting ageworthy wines age.

Claus,
I think the real conclusion here is, that everyone should come to their own conclusion, but with as much information as they can get.
Not sure how you conflate the statement " I don’t think that most even great wine have 50 great years in them" to “I think the only way to enjoy wine is to drink it in the parking lot of the store just after buying it”

[Francois_Audouze]

I am sorry but my poor English does not help me to understand what Mike wanted to mean with his last message.

I would like to say that the number of great wines of more than 50 years is largely greater than many people think. And the number of mistakes of interpretation of old wines is extremely great.

So many old wines have been mistreated because the first smell was unfriendly. Many wines of small appellations have performed. Of course less than the wines with greater appellations, but to think that if they are of a small appellation it is sure that they are without interest is a great mistake.

The world of old wines is extremely rewarding because the number of good surprises is very great.

To approach the world of wines of more than 50 years requires a positive attitude.

[Claus_Jeppesen]

@Mike Francisco

@Claus Jeppesen

The conclusion must be:
There is no point in not letting ageworthy wines age.

Claus,
I think the real conclusion here is, that everyone should come to their own conclusion, but with as much information as they can get.
Not sure how you conflate the statement " I don’t think that most even great wine have 50 great years in them" to “I think the only way to enjoy wine is to drink it in the parking lot of the store just after buying it”

Fact: it is waste to drink them in the shut down fase. (Except for the team)

[Howard_Cooper]

New data point. Last night, I was at a friend’s house and he opened a 1978 Ridge Geyserville. It was fabulous.

[Anton_D]

Lingering on the first post…

1. Old wines that still taste good are fun because they transmit vineyard and wine making essences over time. Is there more than this?

For me, yes. I like the characteristics wine takes on with age. I would think there wouldn’t be controversy over this. Different palates like different things. I am not a lover of bright fruit forward kinds of wine. I like a more austere flavor profile and enjoy the cedar/leather/humidor characteristics that appear with age. I enjoy somewhat more muted fruit profiles. I like the characteristics of ‘tertiary flavors.’ (Sorry for that pretentious wording.) I also like food pairing more with aged wines than ‘brand new’ wines.

2. I like the idea of age retaining beauty, but are very old wines necessarily better than not so old? (Besides high tannin Bordeaux types, which will etch your palate in their early years)

Not ‘necessarily.’ Alot of times, with very old wines, the wine drinker has to assume a greater degree of charity in his/her opinion of the wine. The fact that a wine is still alive at a ‘very old’ age is often enough to generate excess enthusiasm. Also, all ‘objectivity’ of a wine nerd who knows what he is being served can be tossed aside by the knowledge that he is drinking a unicorn wine. To go with that, there is a bit of social pressure for people to say great things about those wines so other people will know the taster has a palate fine enough to ‘get’ the very old wine. So, it all blurs together.

3. What if someone could make a wine that is better (to most palates) in 3 years than famous ones at 40 years (tasted blind)? Would it still be cheaper in the face of the gravitas of ageing?

Fine by me. “Better” has quite a range of attributes, though. If you can toss together a 1945 Mouton for a hundred bucks, I’d buy it!

4. Do aged wines in one’s cellar confer status? If so, does this factor into price, above and beyond taste and aromatics?

It certainly does. As does letting people know when you drink it!

[Mike_Francisco]

@Claus Jeppesen

@Mike Francisco

@Claus Jeppesen

The conclusion must be:
There is no point in not letting ageworthy wines age.

Claus,
I think the real conclusion here is, that everyone should come to their own conclusion, but with as much information as they can get.
Not sure how you conflate the statement " I don’t think that most even great wine have 50 great years in them" to “I think the only way to enjoy wine is to drink it in the parking lot of the store just after buying it”

Fact: it is waste to drink them in the shut down fase. (Except for the team)

Claus,
You really need to look the word Fact up, you are using it wrong. We are talking about opinions, there are no facts here.

I don’t get why it is so important to some of you for me to be wrong. You drink what you want the way you want and unless we are sharing a bottle, I’m good.

Also I think some of what Anton has said (not the first part, you have to read the whole thing) in the post above this one throws more shade on old wines then most of what I have said. How come no one is up in his face? Is it because even with all issues he points out he is still on your side?

[Wes_Barton]

@Anton D

To go with that, there is a bit of social pressure for people to say great things about those wines so other people will know the taster has a palate fine enough to ‘get’ the very old wine.[/b]

Maybe if the experience is a novelty. If you drink a lot of older wines you’re going to know the difference between mediocre and exceptional, and won’t feel any pressure to pretend otherwise.

[John_Morris]

@Wes Barton

@Anton D

To go with that, there is a bit of social pressure for people to say great things about those wines so other people will know the taster has a palate fine enough to ‘get’ the very old wine.[/b]

Maybe if the experience is a novelty. If you drink a lot of older wines you’re going to know the difference between mediocre and exceptional, and won’t feel any pressure to pretend otherwise.

You really think so? For many people it’s true, but I think there’s a large class of affluent wine drinkers for whom drinking “fine wine,” including mature wine, is a status thing, and in my experience there are relatively few people who evaluate what they’re drinking critically. Where those two categories overlap, I think there’s a lot of oohing and ahing at wines that have cachet but simply aren’t that good, or are over the hill.

[Anton_D]

@Wes Barton

@Anton D

To go with that, there is a bit of social pressure for people to say great things about those wines so other people will know the taster has a palate fine enough to ‘get’ the very old wine.[/b]

Maybe if the experience is a novelty. If you drink a lot of older wines you’re going to know the difference between mediocre and exceptional, and won’t feel any pressure to pretend otherwise.

I think we see the same sort of thing happen when people drink a “100 point” wine.

There is probably SQN pressure, Screaming Eagle pressure, d’Yquem pressure.

Expectation bias and peer/social perception bias exist in any hobby.

[James_Billy]

There are idiots in all walks of life. I think it’s best to ignore them. Maybe we should start with the premise that we are dealing with intelligent, non-superficial wine drinkers when discussing issues like this?

And on the big thread drift about women’s attractiveness over time, the discussion tends to be rather one sided. Men also lose their looks with age. I remember reading or hearing a funny comment along the lines of: “(Young) women used to like it when I looked at them when I was younger. Now they give me with a look of disgust.”

[Robert_Sand]

I have read through most of this thread, not completely.

@Mike Francisco

@Claus Jeppesen

Fact: it is waste to drink them in the shut down fase. (Except for the team)

Claus,
You really need to look the word Fact up, you are using it wrong. We are talking about opinions, there are no facts here.

No, the question if there are certain wines (and quite a lot) which not only can be aged but need age to arrive at a certain quality level is not a personal opinion but a fact - proven by many wine experts and wine lovers over generations.

Only if you - despite this fact - drink any wine still far too early is a matter of personal preference and opinion (and intellegence).

[Mark_Golodetz]

Robert,

I think you need to look at what the definition of a fact is.

Certainly not the combined opinions of many experts, otherwise the world would be flat and round, there is a God or there isn’t, and butter and “I can’t believe it is not butter” taste the same.

Tell me, is climate change a fact?

[Jonathan_Loesberg]

The claim that the earth was flat was a claim about the objective world and would have been a fact if only it were true. One of the things about facts is that they are propositions that claim to describe material reality and thus can be falsified.
The claim that old wines taste good is only true or false for each individual taster. The fact that an infinite number of tasters agree is merely addition. It can’t transform an unfalsifiable claim about an individual’s evaluation of a taste sensation into either a fact or a truth. But for people who know they share the taste, one individual’s claim about the taste of 50 year old wine x can be personal information. And, since there are universally shareable elements of taste, probably many of the seemingly conflicting claims on this thread could probably be resolved, if anyone cared to actually try to analyze what was going on. For instance, Mike Francisco’s claim that old wines taste the same is one that more than one of us have heard from more than one person. Numbers of people, including me, don’t really think that is true. But if you think about which flavors allow one to identify young wines and how trading in forward fruit for secondary and tertiary flavors would change what one needed to look for and perhaps make the differences less distinct in old wines to those who hadn’t trained themselves to perceive them, you can see how both these conflicting claims could make sense.

[Mike_Francisco]

@Mike Francisco

@Claus Jeppesen

@Mike Francisco

Claus,
I think the real conclusion here is, that everyone should come to their own conclusion, but with as much information as they can get.
Not sure how you conflate the statement " I don’t think that most even great wine have 50 great years in them" to “I think the only way to enjoy wine is to drink it in the parking lot of the store just after buying it”

Fact: it is waste to drink them in the shut down fase. (Except for the team)

Claus,
You really need to look the word Fact up, you are using it wrong. We are talking about opinions, there are no facts here.

I don’t get why it is so important to some of you for me to be wrong. You drink what you want the way you want and unless we are sharing a bottle, I’m good.

Also I think some of what Anton has said (not the first part, you have to read the whole thing) in the post above this one throws more shade on old wines then most of what I have said. How come no one is up in his face? Is it because even with all issues he points out he is still on your side?

I would like to apologize to Claus & Anton.

Claus, I took your post personally and that was a mistake, I am sorry.

Anton, I thought you made some very good points, but that is no excuse for dragging you into my fight, for that I apologize.

[Ian_Sutton]

Hi Mike
I always have great respect for someone who ‘fronts up’ and apologies, even when they may have their own grumbles. Bravo.
regards
Ian

[Gerhard_P]

@Mark Golodetz

Robert,
…

Tell me, is climate change a fact?

Not Robert but …

Yes, it is - (except if Trump is God, but because God respects women he cannot be).

[Jonathan_Loesberg]

@Gerhard P.

@Mark Golodetz

Robert,
…

Tell me, is climate change a fact?

Not Robert but …

Yes, it is - (except if Trump is God, but because God respects women he cannot be).

Well, technically, it is a fact that the average heat of the earth has been getting warmer and it is a fact that emissions from fossil fuels can be demonstrated to raise the heat of an enclosed system. Taking fact b to be the cause of fact a is a theoretical claim with sufficient experimental support to be judged true.