Why Bother Collecting and Aging Wine?
Most of what you've been told about cellaring wine is wrong. Some thoughts on age and patience.
A few weeks ago, I spotted a truly unique wine: a 1985 Bruno Giacosa Dolcetto d’Alba. A friend had bought someone’s cellar, and as I scrolled through an inventory list filled with usual suspects from Bordeaux, Napa, along with a few Gran Reserva from Rioja, this 39-year-old outlier jumped out at me. Even though the late Bruno Giacosa is a well-established darling of collectors, it’s his nebbiolo-based Barolo and Barbaresco that get the high prices and place of pride in cellars. Certainly not his modest, everyday dolcetto, the Tuesday night wine of Piedmont. Who the hell ages dolcetto for almost four decades?
Obviously, I had to taste this wine. Fortunately, my friend is very generous, and, at the next meeting of our tasting group, he brought along this strange bottle. The wine was a light brick red, and the first intriguing whiff was of campfire and something medicinal. The first taste was a shock—the wine had amazing juicy acidity and liveliness for such an old wine. As we swirled and sipped further, the campfire blew off, and meatier, spicier, earthier, more savory aromas and flavors came forward. “Soppressata,” said one guy at the table. “Brambly,” said another. “Amaro,” said someone else. For me, this old docletto defied easy descriptors, but I loved its energy and subtle core of fruit that was still present. It was one of the most memorable wines I’ve tasted this year—a true unicorn.
Since then, this 1985 Dolcetto d’Alba has been very much on my mind. I still wonder if whoever originally acquired this bottle actually meant to age it this long. More likely, it was bought with a bunch of Barolo and was simply forgotten in the cellar. But it also made me think about why we age wine in the first place.
These days, a lot of wine people—particularly those selling to a younger generation—shy away from conversations about time and aging. You rarely hear about old bottles in the wine bars that sell skin-contact and chilled reds alongside wood-fired pizzas and spicy rigatoni and honey-drizzled ricotta. We’re told that wine conversations must focus on “de-mystifying” wine, or be Wine 101. Though we’re still not sure whether the kind of audience that likes fun wine tips will ever care deeply about the topic for the long haul, I get the impulse.
Talk of vintages and dusty bottles feels hopelessly boomer-ish, like rich old men arguing over their golf games. When wine talk does turn to aging, it too often focuses on a nebulous stratum of collectors for whom we toss around ideas of wine as investment, fueled by predictions from critics on pricey bottles from certain regions, producers, and vintages that will presumably increase in value as the years roll on.
Still, throughout history, great wines were always meant to be aged. The reason certain wines are more expensive than others is because they’ve proven to be consistently ageworthy over decades and centuries. That’s why collectors stick with age-tested wines like Bordeaux, Burgundy, Barolo, Brunello, Napa, Rioja, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Mosel, and the like. The problem is that prices of certain collector wines have risen beyond the reach of the average wine aficionado—which as I’ve written about, was not always the case. Unfortunately, astronomic price and ageworthiness is now conflated.
What gets lost in our current generational wine divide—of new and natty versus old and staid—is we’ve lost sight of what aging wine is really about. It’s not about a slowly accruing financial investment, like a mutual fund. What’s much more interesting—what collecting wine should be about—is that cellar aging brings an unpredictable, wild-card, human element into wine. Just as with a person, we never know exactly how a wine will mature over the years. Putting a wine away for three or five or ten or twenty years is an investment only in being able to open a unique wine in the future—a taste of the past, something you can never buy in the present. Long aging in a cellar is an essential concept in understanding wine. And I fear the concept is becoming lost.
The fact is that there are many more ageworthy wines in the world than we’re led to believe by the Liv-ex index or by legacy wine critics. And these wines are affordable and pay back your patience if you’re willing to cellar them.
An example I like to use is the wines I found on a forgotten Alsace shelf in South Jersey, around 2015. There, two old bottles were collecting dust. The first, a 2004 Domaine Zind-Humbrecht “Clos Windsbuhl” Pinot Gris was one of the sexiest wines—and definitely the best pinot gris—I’ve ever tasted: big, rich, golden, with incredible smoky salty notes, like a campfire-grilled peach dunked into the ocean. The second was 2001 Pierre Sparr Riesling Schoenenbourg, from one of Alsace’s grand crus. It was riesling that had probably been wild and rambunctious with lots of acidity and sweetness in youth. But, after 14 years in the bottle, it had mellowed, with aromas of a pep-rally bonfire and notes of honey and apple peel, still clinging to its brightness and snappy, smoky finish. It was like drinking one of those last warm, sunny days of fall. Their yellowing price tags read $23.99 and $20.99, respectively.
No critic ever scored those wines high enough to convince a collector to invest money in cases to squirrel away, perhaps in hopes of future re-sale. But they are both crucial bottles to my own wine path. Serendipity, in wine as in life, is part of the journey. I could say the same for certain 10-year-old xarel·lo from Catalonia, 20-year-old single-vineyard grüner veltliners from Austria’s Kamptal region, or 50-year-old ramisco from Colares, in Portugal. None of those wines cost the same as top Bordeaux or Burgundy or Napa, but all deliver the nonesuch experience that great aged wine promises.
Which brings me back to 1985 Bruno Giacosa Dolcetto d’Alba. Tasting that wine shook me, and forced me once again to realize that collecting and aging wine is not just one thing. You can age all sorts of wines. If we don’t know how a certain wine ages, it may only be because no one ever tried to age a particular grape, region, or producer.
In the coming months, The New Wine Review will publish a series of pieces on what it means to collect wine today. We’ll discuss certain emerging regions, styles, grapes, and producers. But we’ll also talk about a more intangible approach, a curation and appreciation mindset, and the joys of aged wine. There are many ways to collect wine, and that’s what we’ll explore. Check it out at this link.
I'm glad you wrote this and I totally agree. I'm active on the wine subreddit and I often downvote or do my own reply when people say you can only age something expensive. It's really about the fundamentals: acidity, alcohol, tannin, body, primary fruit. Plenty of wines have some or all of these characteristics in high enough level.
As a long-time wine geek, I shied away from collecting and aging wine. The only significantly aged reds that entrance me are old Nebbiolo and great Sangiovese (which are mostly outside of my budget), and I have never had an aged Pinot Noir (Burgundy or other) beyond ten years old that I've thought tasted better than the younger version. And white Burgundy seems like a recipe for disappointment these days.
Then I realized the sweet spot: by beloved Riesling—the best, most exciting, and value-driven wine to age. Now I have a shocking amount of the stuff tucked away to watch evolve.
I'm excited to read this series, Jason!