MICHAEL FRIDJHON: The art of ageing well

Few wine enthusiasts ever get to drink fully mature wines. This is partly because most wines produced in the 21st century were never intended to age. They were made with ready drinkability in mind. As ever more consumers opt for youthful, juicy reds with tannins made precociously soft by global warming (and cellar strategies like micro-oxygenation), the availability of the more classically styled wines declines even further.

As a result, there is often a mixed reaction when a properly aged bottle comes to the table. It’s not uncommon for people to wrinkle their noses; the more charitable among them simply describe such wines as “flat” or “dull” or even “off”. Few people attempt to keep wines for any length of time. A well-known steakhouse proprietor told me that his customers consider anything beyond five years “over the hill”.

Proper wine maturation is less about survival and more about evolution. Only certain varieties have what it takes to age well, to acquire complexity with age. These include cabernet, chardonnay, chenin blanc, pinot noir and syrah. The jury is out on merlot: those who believe it should be included cite half a dozen exceptions grown mainly in Pomerol on Bordeaux’s Right Bank.

Wines that evolve with age acquire different features with the passage of time. The primary fruit notes (the often irritating “berry and cherry” descriptors used by wine judges) fade and are replaced with the more secondary aromatics: mushroom, truffle, undergrowth or forest floor. People who love the juiciness of young reds start to lose interest at this point. By the time a wine is into its tertiary stage of development, they’ve checked out: too many old leathery notes and no visible fruit. The process of maturation is really simply managed decay, and like dry-aged beef, it’s not to everyone’s taste.

There are no absolutes about this: the oldest (unfortified) red wine I’ve sampled was more than 180 years old. It was fragile but still alive. The oldest white was a more vibrant German riesling that was actually almost a century older. Neither were patently past it. The appeal of most fine reds more than 50 years old depends on features so elusive that it’s not always possible to delineate them. The late André Simon once described a 70-year Lafite as “over the hill, but not tumbling down. No sir, it was marching down with head up and chest out.”

Wine Magazine has been hosting a 10-year tasting since 2017. Depending on the quality of the vintage a decade previously, somewhere between 60 and 80 different wines are submitted for blind judging. This year’s line-up is one of the largest, but, then, 2015 was a much-celebrated vintage at the time.

The white wines were tasted the day before the reds. The organisers were more than a little surprised at the absence of chenin blancs. Had the producers sold out of their library stocks or did they have their doubts about their wines? Instead, mostly sauvignon blanc and sauvignon blanc blends appeared on the tasting bench. The standout wines (on 95 points) in that line-up were the Highlands Road Sine Cera blend, the Tokara Director’s Reserve and the De Grendel sauvignon blanc. The Tokara chardonnay (on 93 points) was the highest scoring chardonnay.

Three red wines averaged 95: the Jordan Long Fuse Cabernet, the Tokara Director’s Reserve and the Kanonkop Paul Sauer. Several more came in on 94: the Groot Constantia Gouverneurs Reserve, the Nederburg Auction Reserve Bin 163, the Neil Ellis Jonkershoek cabernet and the Rust en Vrede estate wine.

None of the top-ranked reds were ready to drink. All were still palpably youthful and deserved more time in bottle to reveal themselves. From that whole line-up of 86 reds, the one wine that was as delicious as it was ever going to be was The Drift Estate’s There are Still Mysteries pinot noir. I would happily have taken it for dinner, or slipped it into a burgundy tasting to watch it turn a few heads.

This column originally appeared in Business Day.