The other night with dinner we enjoyed the first bottle out of my cellar in over seven years. Allow me to explain—and full disclosure here. When we moved from San Francisco back to New Mexico in August of 2017, two things didn’t make the trip: over a thousand LPs and my wine cellar. Both were stored in Oakland at Subterraneum, owned by good friend Joe Bilman.
Why didn’t we do the whole kit and caboodle at the time given the cost of the move? And not to mention how leaving a house after 15 years is a galactic pain in the ass. The reasons were simple: first, all our earthly belongings had to be trucked across Arizona. As anyone knows, August in Arizona is a reasonable facsimile of the surface of the sun. But there’s more. Those last few days in the City coincided with one of the rare heat waves in Northern California, which aren’t so rare these days because of climate change. To that point, when I drove the rental van through Alameda in the East Bay on our way out, the temp on the dash read 113 degrees—conditions not fit for man, beast, LP’s, or wine.
I’ll spare you the lengthy travails of trying to get the wine and records here after the fact. Suffice it to say that events including the pandemic conspired to thwart my every effort. Also, any shipping company wanted an arm and a leg while also requiring me to have a loading dock or a forklift at my end (honey, what did we do with that forklift?). However, a solution came in the form of my buddy Joe discovering that UPS does freight shipping at a fraction of the cost of most other companies.
The long and short of it (too late) is that several weeks ago, a UPS truck picked up the two pallets of my wine and records from Joe’s place on a Monday afternoon and took them to the Oakland airport. Then, according to UPS tracking, they were received at 1:20 AM Tuesday in the Albuquerque airport, about eight hours later. Then a trucking company here in Albuquerque delivered them to our house the next day—literally putting both pallets in our garage. Will miracles never cease, as my Mom used to say. The records, by the way, are now in my office and the wine is in storage in Santa Fe. Yes, there are only two wine storage facilities in the state of New Mexico, and both are in Santa Fe, an hour away. Such is life behind the adobe curtain.
Back to dinner the other night and the first bottle out of my cellar in over seven years. My cellar, by the way, is more like Swiss cheese at this point in that it’s full of holes. The wine in question was a 2015 Chardonnay from a top California producer. I’d looked forward to trying the bottle for some time. Wines from the producer in question are hard to come by and only available through a mailing list or a few select restaurants that are granted small allocations.
Over the years, I’ve had more than my fair share of older California Chardonnays. Some age beautifully, some not so much. The other night’s bottle was somewhere in between. As I initially smelled and tasted the wine, the first thing I thought of was butterscotch spilled on a picnic table; a not-so-technical description of oxidized fruit and old wood. As for the oak, it probably dominated things when the wine was released, but had integrated to become part of the conversation vs. shouting for attention.
Overall, the wine reflected its age, which was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was for it (wine) to be mono-dimensional. Beyond the Calvados-like notes of oxidized apple, preserved citrus, and old oak, there wasn’t much there. Specifically, there was nothing happening in the mid-palate.
It goes without saying that not all wines age well. Sure they age in the context that any wine eventually reaches the point of vinegarity. I just made that word up. But the faux-term holds true in that every wine ever made eventually reaches a point of oxidation and becomes undrinkable. The process is quicker for some wines vs. others. The bag-in-a-box vs. classified growth Bordeaux thing. Otherwise, the 2015 Chardonnay reminded me of a phrase from my tasting book:
“Wine as a living thing is never static in the bottle. The alcohol and acids react together constantly to form new compounds while other compounds dissolve. These changes happen over time and at different rates. No surprise that every time a bottle is opened the wine inside is at a different stage in its evolution.”
You’re probably thinking “tell me something new.” And I get it. But with enough tasting experience, one has expectations about how a wine will age, as well as how long before it totters into the abyss of vinegarity. It’s also why any wine purchased in quantity shows differently with each bottle opened.
That brings up the age-old question of when should I drink this bottle? The answer is now. In all seriousness, my take on it is if you have a bottle in hand and are posing the question, the answer is to enjoy the wine at your earliest convenience. If it’s an old bottle, by all means plan a meal around it to commemorate the occasion. But avoid getting carried away and don’t annoy everyone else involved. Also, if it’s an old bottle, be sure to have a backup on hand in case the wine in question has already attained vinegarity status.
Ultimately, I think it’s best to drink wine on the way up, so to speak. Make the mistake of opening a bottle, and after the fact wistfully saying “if only we could have waited a few more years.” As opposed to pulling the cork only to find the wine deader than a friggerzoid (obscure Disney reference). Likewise, if there’s anything I took away from the Chardonnay the other night, it’s that I wish we could have enjoyed the bottle about three years ago. So leaving one’s cellar unattended for seven years may not be a brilliant idea. At the very least, all the wines will be that much older. And some of them won’t improve, they’ll just taste old. Like butterscotch on a picnic table.
Learn more professional wine tasting strategies in my book,
Message in the Bottle: A Guide to Tasting Wine
