VINTAGE WINES FOR VINTAGE GIRLS?

Bordeaux - France

This past week, it seems that every other girl in town has been talking, at some point, about vintage dresses, vintage jewelry, vintage brooches or vintage purses. It reminded me that wines can be vintage too.

Yes! Vintage refers to the year that the grapes were harvested, and it’s also a way to track a wine’s potential for aging. The word vintage comes from the French word vendage meaning grape harvest. On one hand, the vintage wines are mainly superior quality wines, and its production has matured in a separate way. On the other hand, table wines are not dated and the production from more than one year may be blended too.

An important consideration in assessing a vintage wine is the weather conditions under which grapes are grown. It all depends on the annual rainfall, the sunny days and the night time temperatures which all clearly affect the grape harvest every year.

Now, when wines producers blend grapes harvested in different years they call those wines non vintage. The aim of combining grapes is to achieve a consistent result. For example, if you liked a great Chardonnay last fall, you'd probably like to find it again. That’s why most of the wineries now produce blends, so that people can find the same wine in the future years. Vintage wines are limited to the exclusive year that they were harvested.

If you are planning to have a cellar some day, then you need to think about starting to collect vintage wines and a trick of the trade said that Bordeaux wines has the largest variance in vintages!

I appreciate vintage objects as they bring back in time some “antique” feeling, and I can’t wait to have a glass of a vintage wine.

Does anybody have a bottle of a 1960 Corton, Grand Cru Magnum, red Burgundy? Please let me know!...


Tip of the week:
Wines that get better within time are red and white Bordeaux, Burgundy, Barolo, Barbaresco, Rioja and some California Cabernets.