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How do you recognise drinking maturity?
There is only one thing worse than drinking a wine too early: drinking it too late. The highest pleasure is to drink a wine at its peak: when it has reached its optimal drinking maturity. But when is that?
The moment of optimal drinking maturity can be different for every wine lover - depending on his or her personal preferences. Every good wine goes through different phases in the course of its "life" after bottling, during which it changes its aroma and also its texture. Many people prefer young, fruity wines with a fresh aroma and harmonious taste, others like more mature wines that are characterised by complex, less primarily fruity aromas, but are particularly long-lasting.
Anticipating the ageing process
You can often tell the ageing potential of a wine from the label - if you know how to read it. If you have several bottles of a wine and want to find out how long it is likely to be drinkable with pleasure, you can also conduct a sensory experiment for the sake of simplicity:
To estimate how a wine will develop in the future, expose it to air in a controlled manner by leaving it in the open bottle or a carafe for a few hours or even longer (cooled if necessary). This is because exposure to oxygen is the main cause of the wine's aroma and texture changes over time. A wine that does not lose its expressiveness after one, two or three days in the opened bottle 'or in the carafe, or even gets better (more complex, harmonious, smooth), has a great ageing potential (more than five years).
However, this experiment should be done primarily with younger wines. Old wines that have already been in the bottle for more than a decade often break down quickly and inexorably with air. A young wine that survives only a few hours in the air has no ageing potential and should be drunk within the next few months.
At least 80 per cent of all wines produced in the world are intended for drinking within the first one to two years after harvest. These wines reach drinking maturity within six to eight weeks of bottling. These are mostly base, litre or estate wines, which are intended to provide uncomplicated drinking pleasure. These wines also do not go through a long life cycle or one that can be divided into individual phases: they are characterised by fruit aromas, supplemented by a subtle spiciness if necessary, and they are harmonious in terms of acidity and/or tannin from the start.
After one or two years, the fruit aromas recede, the freshness disappears, the wine becomes inharmonious and dull, it smells and tastes "old". Then you don't want to drink it any more, and you shouldn't. By now, at least one new, fresh vintage should be available.
Clues to the ageing potential
Such wines that can be drunk quickly are usually recognisable by the fact that the grape variety is written in large letters on the label and that there is no complicated designation of origin (place or individual vineyard name). In this respect, the designation of origin is already a clue to the ageing potential of a wine.
The origin is measured by the size of the area from which the grapes for the wine come. There are just as clear regulations for this geographical framework as there are for the production of the wine itself. As a rule of thumb, the narrower the origin, i.e. the smaller the area, the higher the quality of the wine and the greater its ageing potential. This is related to other factors that can be indirectly read from the designation of origin. For only if the wine meets certain quality specifications is it allowed to bear a protected designation of origin.
One of the most important quality factors for wine is the quantity of grapes produced, the yield. The fewer grapes a single vine bears, the more extractives each berry contains, and the higher the extract, the higher the quality and ageing potential of the wine. The maximum quantity of grapes produced is precisely defined for each protected designation of origin: The lower the maximum harvest quantity, the better and more ripe the wine.
Wines whose grapes come from a single vineyard or plot have the highest quality and the greatest ripening potential. In Germany, the Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter (VDP) has classified vineyards again; the highest quality wines come from so-called "Erste Lagen" and Große Lagen. In Austria, origin-protected wines with DAC status are particularly ripe. In the Romance wine-growing countries of Europe(France, Italy, Spain, Portugal), the narrowness of the origin is indicated by the AOP or DOP status. Wines that bear the name of a single vineyard and/or a protected designation of origin (DAC, AOP, DOP, AOC, DOC, DOCG, DO, DOCa) on the label thus have a higher quality and greater ageing potential than wines without such protection of origin.
Another criterion for wine quality and maturity potential can be a predicate, i.e. an additional designation. Prädikats are only relevant for German and Austrian wines and are based on the ripeness of the grapes in the vineyard. This results in the must weight, i.e. the sum of the dissolved extract substances (mainly the sugar content) in the berries. Again, the higher the extract, the higher the quality and ripeness. The main predicates are Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, Trockenbeerenauslese and Eiswein.
Phases of the ripening process
A wine whose protected designation of origin already documents its quality and ageing potential on the label can develop over several years or even decades in the bottle. In the process, as already mentioned, it passes through different phases.
A young wine is like a small child: impetuous, a little wild, not yet fully developed in character. The individual components(fruit, acidity, tannin, possibly wood) are not yet integrated and perhaps still "stand next to each other": each component is present and identifiable on its own. The acidity in particular can be quite dominant (sometimes sharp) in this phase; as can the wood, which can drown out all the other aromas with notes of smoke, toast, vanilla and caramel, as well as the tannin in red wines, which leaves a furry, drying feeling on the tongue. The fruit is intensely pronounced at this stage, reminiscent of fresh fruit and, depending on the grape variety, vegetables or other plants.
After a certain time, the wine enters "puberty": it becomes inaccessible, closes up and becomes unharmonious. During this phase, a chemical transformation takes place. The individual ingredients react with each other, aroma compounds are dissolved and linked anew, the fruit recedes, acidity, tannin and wood are gradually integrated. In this phase, which usually lasts several years, the wine is no pleasure and actually undrinkable. It simply needs rest and should develop undisturbed in the cellar.
After the conversion is complete, the wine has grown up, so to speak. The individual components (fruit, acidity, tannin, wood) are now harmoniously combined, new aromas have been added, the wine has become more complex and elegant and has found its inner balance; the character is fully developed. The fruit aromas are now less prominent, more restrained, but more complex. As the wine matures further, they diminish more and more in favour of "autumnal" aromas (nuts, earth, mushrooms, leaves). The tannin becomes mellow, the texture soft, smooth and full-bodied. The colour becomes darker: golden yellow for white wines, brownish for red wines.
This is followed by the degeneration phase: the wine slowly "dies". The colour loses its luster and becomes darker and darker (amber to brown for white wines, brick red to reddish brown for red wines), the fruit disappears completely, the aroma becomes more and more earthy and spicy and finally becomes diffuse and dull; the texture gradually becomes dull, the tannin brittle, the individual components separate again from their connection, acidity and bitter substances ultimately remain as a "skeleton".
Recognising phases of maturity
In this respect, analogies can be drawn - as has already been done here - between the development of a wine and the stages of a person's life or the sequence of the seasons. A wine reaches its optimal drinking maturity in its adulthood or in its "summer". This phase takes up the longest time in the "life" of high-quality wines and extends over several years. Therefore, drinking maturity is not really a point in time, but a period of time. In order to find the right time, one can orientate oneself on the above-mentioned points of reference. A really good wine lasts at least five years, many even several times that. However, it always depends on the storage conditions under which the wine has matured. If in doubt, there is only one thing to do: try it out!
If a wine has the sensory characteristics described above, one can roughly guess in which "phase of life" it is currently in. If it is still in its youth, the experiment outlined at the beginning comes into play again: carafe it and let it "breathe" for several hours, i.e. expose it to the air. If the wine has just reached "puberty", you can also try exposing it to oxygen for a few hours, but a positive change is not guaranteed in this difficult phase. You can immediately recognise the maturity of the wine when it has "grown up": harmony, complexity, length... Then enjoy it for several hours! And if the wine has already passed its zenith and is only somewhat frail in the glass: make the most of it and drink it as quickly as it is still enjoyable. You may not get the most pleasure from old wines that are already in degeneration, but you can learn the most from them. But wines that are already dead, sensory dead, can only be disposed of immediately, please, albeit with appropriate regret.
Most wine guides and critics give explicit drinking recommendations: They name the period of time within which the wine in question is expected to develop positively or at least not negatively when stored properly (dark, rather cool and at a constant temperature). In addition, the wine magazine "Vinum" or the "Little Johnson" by the British wine critic Hugh Johnson, for example, offer detailed drinking maturity tables for the vintages in individual wine-growing regions.