How long should a wine be aged?

How long to age a wine is a matter of personal taste.  If you spent over $10 on a bottle of wine, it will probably improve with as little as two to three years of age in the cellar.  I recall one party when I brought a three-year old 2003 J. Lohr Riverstone Chardonnay to share, and another guest had brought the 2006 vintage which was selling in the stores at that time.  I had heard that white wines should be opened in the first two years, but this turned out to be bad advice.  I compared the 2003 vintage side-by-side with the 2006 vintage and found the slightly older wine to be less edgy, better balanced, and offered a broader spectrum of flavors than the younger wine.  More recently I was impressed by the performance of a two-year old 2008 Challis Lane Cabernet Sauvignon that I had brought to a party that was very well received – I paid $10.05 for two bottles at a BevMo five-cent sale.  Essentially, by tucking these $10 to $20 wines away for two years, I have added 50% to 100% to their value when consumed blind.

So, how long should you cellar a wine and expect improvement?  A lot depends upon how the wine tastes when it is young.  A soft wine with barely noticeable tannins may benefit from two years in the cellar.  A wine with bolder tannins would benefit from more aging, which tends to soften these tannins.  A well-made Zinfandel can be cellared for five years or more and expect it to improve.  A Cabernet Sauvignon with powerful tannins, heavy body, and apparent richness will benefit from ten to twenty years in the cellar if you have the patience.  The trick with aging a Cabernet (including Bordeaux) is that these wines tend to shut down early for a number of years before blossoming, where only aeration tricks can bring out the wine’s beauty.  I suggest reading tasting notes and advice from other tasters on www.cellartracker.com (for free) to help guide you.

What happens when you cellar a wine for too long?  The crisp fruit flavors give way to earthy flavors.  Those fruits that remain tend toward plums, prunes, and raisins.  The wine’s intensity and weight both wane.  And the structure of the wine can disappear.  Does this render the wine undrinkable?  No.  Unpleasant?  Possibly.  The best way to learn is to experiment by opening one bottle from the same case every year.  And, if you do not like how a cellared bottle tastes, try letting the wine breathe another hour and taste it again.  I found one wine that required seven hours of decanting to reveal its fruit after it had been aged for a few years.  The worst case in over-aging is that the wine has turned to vinegar, but that would take a lot of patience and negligence to accomplish.

The winemaker at Shenandoah Vineyards once provided the following guide to cellaring the wines they produced that can be used as a general guide for most wines costing $30 or less.  Of course, you may be able to estimate this better by tasting the wine when young and considering its balance, structure, and tannin level.

	Improve	Hold	Open
Wine	Years	years	days
Sauvignon Blanc	3	2	2
White Zinfandel	1	2	2-3
Zinfandel	3	4	2
Cab-Shiraz	4	4	2
Zinfandel - select	5	5	2
Barbera	5	5	2
Sangiovese	3	2	2
Cabernet Sauvignon	5	5	2
Primitivo	4	4	2