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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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.
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