Why does wine need to age? Can it age theoretically forever?
In: Chemistry
Wine is made from grape juice, which has a lot of sugar in it. Yeast, which are super-tiny fungi (think mushrooms) drink up all the sugar and burp out alcohol. If you let it sit long enough, this can go on until there’s pretty much zero sugar left and the yeasts basically starve themselves to death! But after this yeast feast, we have wine — alcoholic grape juice. That’s called fermentation.
But you can imagine after this process: the wine is kind of alive, and actually pretty unstable. Sort of like if you leave a bottle of salad dressing out for a while, it’ll separate into oil and vinegar and herbs — but wine is even more unstable than that. Lots of juices are breaking down and reassembling and starting to make smells and tastes that are really awesome.
The “peak awesome” or moment when the wine is at its best is up to some debate. It could be a few months, it could be a few years. In some really rare cases, it could be a few decades. But the wine will eventually start to taste dusty or dirty if it’s left to age for too long.
Beer does the same thing, and many agree there’s a cardboard taste that starts to take over once the beer gets too old. Liquors like whisky go thru a second process called distillation, so they’re actually very stable. If you put it in a sealed glass bottle in a windowless room, it’ll stay the same for … maybe forever. You’d need to let it be exposed to air or wood or light for it to change.
So, yes, under the right conditions, you could age wine forever — but it will eventually taste really bad.
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