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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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of certain vintages, what they are often focussing on is not how long it spent in the barrel, but which year it was originally made – at higher levels the quality of a wine is very dependant on the grapes used to make it, and the quality of those grapes comes from the environment they grew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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