eli5: What about the taste of wine actually gets better with age? Articles online describe flavor can improve over time, but not what about the flavor changes.
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It depends on the wine, but generally red wines get less sharp and less…grape-juicy. They can develop undertones of earth, berries, nuts, truffle, etc. These flavors exist in younger versions of the wine, but they can be less pronounced and harder to find in a younger wine. Again, it really depends on the particular wine in question. Some wines age and don’t really change all that much or even taste worse, but that also depends on how they are produced and ultimately stored…and on the drinker’s preferences.
Flavor in general is a delicate thing, not just in wine.
Most wine that improves with age contains tannins either from the grape seeds and skin, or the oak in the barrels, or both.
Tannins are a class of chemicals that includes very simple compounds and much more complex ones. The simple ones tend to be very bitter (they’re that flavor in unripe fruit that is bitter and makes your mouth feel painfully dry). The complex ones are flavor compounds in tobacco, fruit especially berries, chocolate, earthy mushroom flavors and most of the other flavors that wine is often compared.
Over time the simple tannins link up to create more complex tannin chemicals which take the flavor from very bitter to reminiscent of all sorts of various good things.
Well firstly, unlike with, say, scotch aged in barrels, aging doesn’t categorically change the flavor of wine after it has been bottled. Glass won’t react with anything in the the wine or absorb anything from it like scotch does from oak. So aging wine only changes due to stuff already in the wine reacting with other stuff in the wine. This means that many wines won’t get better with age appreciably. Some may even get worse, and some wines are known to go through a “difficult age” where they’re actually considered worse for a period before getting better down the road.
What is actually happening in the wine really depends on the particular wine. Wine can have all kinds of varied complex molecules in it due to the peculiarities of the grapes and the fermentation process, and it’s these molecules that will be reacting with each other – very slowly – to make any kind of appreciable change in the flavor. Tannins, which taste bitter in wine, can recombine slowly into larger tannin chains and even eventually fall out as sediment. More tannin flavor is associated with bitterer, younger wine, which becomes smoother over time as the esters combine. Acids and alchohols can recombine into various kinds of esters, which both makes the wine taste less noticeably acidic, and presents new flavors – many types of ester compounds happen to be found in flavorings, aromas, and essential oils, for good reason. Wine tasters also say that wines lose their “primary” and “youthful” flavors as they age, which in turn makes other flavors that might have been present in the young wine but just covered up by those more vibrant flavors easier to detect.
Some wines will mature over time and develop more complex and interesting flavours. But not all of them do so. Wine is produced for a market, so if you go to your local store and buy a bottle of cheap wine it will most likely not taste any better in five years than it does now, and in fact will most likely taste a lot worse, because it is produced with the intention that it will be drunk young. However, if you buy a good quality burgundy (for instance) that is only a few years old and leave it (in a suitable place – which means a constant cool temperature) for a decade it is very likely it will have aged well and have developed so that instead of tasting fruity and lively it will have more depth to the taste (think of dried fruit and spices). Of course, you could be unlucky and the wine might have ‘corked’ and gone off. All of this predominantly applies to red wine.
on top of the excellent answers already provided, I would point out that a lot of the value placed on certain vintages, meaning wine produced in a certain year, simply have to do with that being a great year for grapes. if you get a perfect mix of sun and rain one year then the wine will be nice. for years to come people will talk about how nice the wine was that year. it doesn’t matter how long it sits in the bottle, it was nice when it went in.
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