If you go into a wine shop and look at the vintage years on labels, you'll find that most are one or two years old. If they are white, this is not a problem; most are meant to be drunk young. But if it's a big gutsy red, then in an ideal world, you probably should keep it for a few years in a dim, cool cellar.
Alas, we do not live in an ideal world and virtually none of us have cellars, dim, cool or otherwise. Statistics in places like Australia and Britain show 78 per cent of wine is drunk the week it is purchased, and I reckon that in Hong Kong, this is probably more like 95 per cent.
Why do wine-makers rush their produce to market if they know it's not really ready to drink? The answer is simple; money.
Say a winery produces 100,000 bottles a year of a dry cabernet sauvignon-merlot blend. The owners are working on a tight margin. They've got hard-eyed, granite-hearted bankers demanding monthly mortgage payments. They would love to keep the wine in their own cellars for two or three years, then sell it at a higher price, but the financial pressures are compelling to get the stuff out to the markets and get money flowing into the bank accounts.
That's why you see supermarket shelves stacked with 1998 vintage reds, wines that should not really be drunk until well into the next millennium. Still, you shrug as you whip out the cork and take a deep sip, maybe you won't be around much into the 21st century, so let's drink up.
Such thoughts crossed my mind the other day as I opened a bottle of 1995 Vigorello, imported by Valdivia (fax: 2873 1246). The Vigorello is made by the firm of San Felice in the heart of the classical Chianti region. This has a little age, and the result shows in the fine, balanced wine.