Kids & Wine Cellars
It's amazing the way something that happens in your life triggers thoughts about something seemingly unrelated. This just happened to me after the birth of our first child, Ella Grace, last week. I should be thinking about the years of love & hard work ahead of us -- and I am -- but I also am strangely thinking about cellaring wine. Before you judge me as the uber-lush I sometimes appear to be -- let me explain...
The English have long had a strong relationship with French wine. And to love French wine means that instant gratification is usually not associated with that love. You need to hold most French wines for years until they become slightly drinkable let alone expertly aged.
Because of this delayed gratification, it became custom for English parents to stash away extra bottles of the juice every year of life for their children. That way -- each child will inherit a perfectly aged cellar of fine wines once they reach adulthood -- and the process will be repeated with their children once they become parents.
What a wonderfully romantic & practical ritual! Why don't we Westerners follow this custom? Are we selfish? Or, is it that we want instant gratification and therefore spend our wine time mostly with New World wines? Yes, it's emphatically the latter.
We love the full fruit of California, Australia, and South American wines. Who needs or wants to wait seven, eight, or more years until a wine becomes drinkable? Not us. But guess what? Some of those same wines become even better with age! They begin their life in the bottle fresh & full of fruit flavor -- unlike many of their Old World counterparts -- but they experience softening of some of the rough edges and the flavors steep in the bottle over the years yielding something possibly even more wonderful. Think about the way a soup needs time for the flavors to meld together to make something even better.
My point is that even if you buy entirely New World wines, you might just want to buy an extra bottle or two of what you like to stash away for a future date. Now, the trick obviously is that not all wines improve with age. Holding a Paso Robles Zinfandel for 10 years might yield something much like balsamic vinegar. But, stashing a big old Merlot from Alexander Valley might just blow your mind in 15 years.
How do you know which wines will age and which won't? Well, there is no absolute answer. You'll need to use resources such as Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate, and the many great community sites like CellarTracker.com to figure it out. One of my favorite things to do is to buy two or three bottles of each wine that I want to try. I'll bust one open immediately and enjoy it -- noting the density of flavors and the structure to help determine how long it will age and what it might taste like in the future. This is obviously a skill learned over time, but you'll have a blast getting there! Then, stash the rest of that wine and keep track of it using CellarTracker. The community there will all contribute information about what the wine was like when opened, letting you watch & react to changes in the wine that you want to see.
I am going to buy as much of the great 2005 Bordeaux vintage that I can get my hands on, because that wine will be sublime in the twenty or so years before my daughter gets ready to drink it. And, I'll continue to save wines for her every wonderful year until that day that I can open a bottle and toast it with Stephanie & Ella. I challenge you to help me adopt that wonderful tradition. You'll not only provide your kids with a perfectly aged cellar, but you'll also be able to enjoy some expertly aged wines, and become a wine expert in the process.
The English have long had a strong relationship with French wine. And to love French wine means that instant gratification is usually not associated with that love. You need to hold most French wines for years until they become slightly drinkable let alone expertly aged.
Because of this delayed gratification, it became custom for English parents to stash away extra bottles of the juice every year of life for their children. That way -- each child will inherit a perfectly aged cellar of fine wines once they reach adulthood -- and the process will be repeated with their children once they become parents.
What a wonderfully romantic & practical ritual! Why don't we Westerners follow this custom? Are we selfish? Or, is it that we want instant gratification and therefore spend our wine time mostly with New World wines? Yes, it's emphatically the latter.
We love the full fruit of California, Australia, and South American wines. Who needs or wants to wait seven, eight, or more years until a wine becomes drinkable? Not us. But guess what? Some of those same wines become even better with age! They begin their life in the bottle fresh & full of fruit flavor -- unlike many of their Old World counterparts -- but they experience softening of some of the rough edges and the flavors steep in the bottle over the years yielding something possibly even more wonderful. Think about the way a soup needs time for the flavors to meld together to make something even better.
My point is that even if you buy entirely New World wines, you might just want to buy an extra bottle or two of what you like to stash away for a future date. Now, the trick obviously is that not all wines improve with age. Holding a Paso Robles Zinfandel for 10 years might yield something much like balsamic vinegar. But, stashing a big old Merlot from Alexander Valley might just blow your mind in 15 years.
How do you know which wines will age and which won't? Well, there is no absolute answer. You'll need to use resources such as Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate, and the many great community sites like CellarTracker.com to figure it out. One of my favorite things to do is to buy two or three bottles of each wine that I want to try. I'll bust one open immediately and enjoy it -- noting the density of flavors and the structure to help determine how long it will age and what it might taste like in the future. This is obviously a skill learned over time, but you'll have a blast getting there! Then, stash the rest of that wine and keep track of it using CellarTracker. The community there will all contribute information about what the wine was like when opened, letting you watch & react to changes in the wine that you want to see.
I am going to buy as much of the great 2005 Bordeaux vintage that I can get my hands on, because that wine will be sublime in the twenty or so years before my daughter gets ready to drink it. And, I'll continue to save wines for her every wonderful year until that day that I can open a bottle and toast it with Stephanie & Ella. I challenge you to help me adopt that wonderful tradition. You'll not only provide your kids with a perfectly aged cellar, but you'll also be able to enjoy some expertly aged wines, and become a wine expert in the process.
posted by The Cask Room, Mike Kallay at
11:16 AM
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