I’ve never had a wine that was older than 10 years. So with that out of the way, what’s the big deal? Why is older wine better? I always assumed it was one of those snobby things where it’s not actually better but more of a status symbol. Am I wrong?
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Most wines don’t age well. There are lots of wines that will turn into vinegar if you leave them on a shelf too long. The various varieties of wine age/go bad at different rates, depending a lot on the grape variety and production process. If the government required wine makers to put a “drink by” date on every bottle of wine, some bottles would have a date 2-3 years after production, some might be 10 years, and some could be 20 years or more.
In general, wine in the bottle will mature and the flavor will change over time. Usually a wine will taste more fruity when it’s younger and will become more earthy and mellow as it ages. Whether that’s better or worse is a matter of personal taste, but beyond a certain point it’s going to change in ways that most people will consider worse.
People see very expensive old wines and assume they’re better just because they’re old, but it’s really more that they were good wines to begin with. If they weren’t they would have been consumed or tossed in the trash years ago. A wine maker might produce only a few thousand cases of a good wine that will age for 20 years or more. Over the years many get consumed, and the relatively few that remain become something of a collector’s item. They go up in value because there are so few of them left.
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