13 Aug Enjoying your Brian Carter Cellars Library Wines

By Brian Carter

For two years now Brian Carter Cellas has offered up rare and beautiful wines from our library as a club release item to the Amour and Devotion Clubs in August. This offers an opportunity to enjoy wines that have received ideal storage conditions for a decade or sometimes two or more! Wine is a unique food: it can get better decade after decade. However, not everyone has had a lot of experience with opening and enjoying older wines so I thought I would write a little piece on that subject.

It is not a safe assumption that all of you have developed an appreciation for older wines. If you are used to drinking your wines within a year or two of release you may find that the taste and aroma on these wines is different from what you are used to. Why do wines change with age? What happens to wines as they age? Small amounts of oxygen flow through the cork, changing the chemistry of the wine. The changes in the wine depend on the conditions the wine ages in, and the chemistry of the individual wines themselves.

The most important factor in the environment the wine is aged in is the consistency of the temperature. The actual temperature is important (ideally between 45 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit) but how consistent the temperature is, especially day to night, is the most important. That is why aging on your coffee table where the temperature can vary over a 24-hour period by 10 degrees or more is not good for the wine. The library wines for Brian Carter Cellars are kept at about 60 degrees consistently every day.

The three biggest factors in wine that determine its ageability are the level of acidity, the tannins and the amount of fruit intensity. All three of these things decrease with time and when they are gone, the wine tends to fall apart. I have often compared wine to a three-legged stool, when any of these factors are gone the stool falls over. That is why the more there is and the balance between these elements determines the ageability of a wine. It is worth noting that Brian Carter Cellars wines have a reputation for aging well because they have that balance of fruit, acid and tannin that is required. When we are talking about white wines, they don’t have much if any tannins, so we are talking about the acidity and fruit.

There is one factor that does increase with time, and that is bottle bouquet: a delightful mixture of dried fruit, dried herbs and flowers. The bottle bouquet is what really makes drinking an old wine a special experience. In my view, this character more than makes up for the drop in fresh fruit but I will admit that it is not for everyone. There is nothing wrong with enjoying a young fruit forward possibly higher tannin wine, but for many of us the experience of a well-aged red wine is well worth the wait.

One other change that can happen with wine aging is the development of sediment or deposit in the bottle. While most of my wines have a minimum of sediment it is generally worth putting a bottle that is ten years old or older, upright 12 to 24 hours before it is consumed so that the wine is not cloudy on the first glass. If sediment is significant, it may be worth decanting the wine. Decanting an older wine is not for the same purpose as decanting a young wine. Young wines benefit from a jolt of oxygen because it pushes them in the direction of an aged wine, so a vigorous splashy decantation is best for them. However, when decanting an old wine oxygen pick up needs to be minimized: be gentle. THEN ENJOY!