Wine. How does it work? What constitutes quality? And aging: can I take the cheap ass grocery store wine, keep it for 50 years and then sell it for millions as vintage?
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As plant matter decomposes and ferments in right conditions, it creates alcohol. You can make alcohol from wood chips if you wanted too.
Fermentation also creates a bunch of other chemicals. A lot of them are bad for you and taste bad too. Distilling is a way to separate alcohol from everything else.
Another way is to make alcohol from grapes, since its fermentation byproducts are not that bad. But it still have tannins, which make wine taste bitter. As wine ages, tannins decompose into other chemicals, which taste OK.
Ageing also causes other processes, and wine will turn into vinegar eventually. Whites turn into vinegar in a few years, good reds can last more than 10. Cheaper wines turn into vinegar faster.
Vintage vines are collector’s items. Nobody drinks them, they are all vinegar. It is very hard to predict what collectors will like in 50 years. Being rare and famous can help, or maybe creative label or bottle. But it is still a lottery, so do not invest your live’s savings into wine.
As a starting point, quality comes from the produce used and the care taken during production. Just like how a homemade apple pie is often better than the frozen one I can buy at the supermarket – more care went into selecting the ingredients used, and into each step of the process along the way. Good-quality wine starts with a vineyard that selects the right varietal of grape, grows it under good conditions, harvests and processes it properly, and takes care at each step of the process.
But here’s the thing with wine: that quality only goes so far. You can buy bottles for $20 that probably put just as much effort into this stuff as the $400 bottles. What you’re paying for, in part , is the label – who is growing it and how much clout they have in the wine industry, which is partly “they’ve been making good stuff consistently, so I trust this will be good” and partly, let’s be real, name recognition, trends, or plain old snobbishness. And what you’re also paying for, in expensive wines, is often *uniqueness*, because they tend to be made from one specific grape, grown in one specific bit of land, to create a very specific flavor that separates them from the pack. Whether that tastes good to you or not is usually a matter of preference, but people who really like wine are often looking for something unique and interesting, above all.
And as for aging wine, it’s important to keep in mind that aging wine doesn’t make it *better* necessarily, it just makes it different. In general, aging wine makes it more mellow – the tannins become less intense, the acidity balances out, etc. And that makes the more subtle flavors stand out more, the ones that would usually be covered up by stronger ones. So it comes down to preference – some people prefer big, juicy, young wines that are packed full of flavor. And some people prefer more mellow wines that have aged, so that they can think about the more subtle notes that come out. Usually the wines that are aged and sold at high prices are wines that are developed by expert winemakers and known by reputation to improve with age, so that people know to expect those interesting, subtle flavors to come out. Plus, I’ll say again, some snobbish people just think that older=better, so are willing to pay more for it.
Your average cheap bottle of red wine is unlikely to improve much over time, so you’re not going to become a millionaire by selling it aged. In fact, a lot of modern wine is basically intended to be drunk young, and developed to taste good at a young vintage. Many wine experts will tell you “find what you like and drink it, and if it’s cheap, so much the better.”
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Supplementing these very detailed answers to mention that often old wine is valuable not because it is old per-se but because it is from a “good year.”
Various weather patterns can affect how grapes grow, and certain years are known for producing good grapes in particular regions. The thing is, you can’t make any more wine from a year that has already passed, so the supply of wine from these years can never increase, even as the number of people who like to drink wine (and the money they’re willing to spend on it) grows. In the end, bottles of wine from those years can become quite valuable.
This phenomenon doesn’t matter to cheap wine, which is made by blending many varieties of grapes grown in many different places. It could matter to moderately-priced supermarket wine, but you’d need to do a lot of research to take advantage.
It’s all about the quality of grapes and where they are grown. The valley leading into Napa California brings very distinct weather into the region, which propagates excellent grape growth for those that are used for wines. Each wine is made with specific grapes or blends of multiple types of grapes.
I would say age has almost nothing to do with good wine. It’s is mostly about where it was made, what year, and with what quality of grape.
Something not mentioned yet (I don’t think) is that not all wine is made/able to be cellared and aged. Many wines have additives to do some of the same things that aging would. Storing that wine won’t do much good.
Making wine is essentially a form of cooking – you are taking raw ingredients like grapes, yeasts and sugars, combining them in a certain way, cooking then together with a fermentation and aging process, and then bottling them up to serve once they are ready.
And just the same as cooking any other food, virtually everything you do will have some effect on the final outcome – different types and qualities of raw materials will taste differently, how you combine those raw materials will change the properties of the finished product, and how long you ferment and age it for will then alter it some more.
Take some grapes from a poor growing season and they may be a bit more bitter than those from a good year, rush your fermentation and produce the end product too quickly and you may have a sub par wine, pick the finest tasting grapes, combined with the freshest water, and put the time and effort in to figure out exactly the best length of time to ferment, and age the product to get the absolute best from your raw materials and you will have something sublime.
When it comes to aging wines, this is the last step before bottling where the wine is stored in barrels for a period – this is where the final changes happen to the wine, with some chemical changes happening over time, and the wood of the barrels it is stored in having some effect on the taste.
It is worth noting that when you hear people speaking of certain vintages, what they are often focussing on is not how long it spent in the barrel, but which year it was originally made – at higher levels the quality of a wine is very dependant on the grapes used to make it, and the quality of those grapes comes from the environment they grew in. The length of the growing season, the weather during that time, and picking the grapes at the optimal point will all affect the quality. So some years have become legendary for the perfect growth that they produced, others virtually written off due to poor conditions and output.
On the note about aging cheap wines, unfortunately once they are bottled and sealed up this process ends. So keeping a cheap bottle stored away in a cupboard won’t result in a bottle that has aged more and taken on that mythical ‘vintage’ description, but a wine of pretty much the same quality as it was when you started, only with the additional chance of having deteriorated due to poor storage with too many temperature swings or other issues that could break down the wine and spoil it.
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