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Taste of time

Simon Tam

When people talk about wine appreciation, they usually talk about the obvious elements: red or white, region and country, and taste. But while all of these are part of the magic that makes a bottle of wine, they are not the most important qualities. The award for most influential feature actually goes to time. In every aspect of making and drinking wine - from growing grapes to decanting a bottle - time has the power to change the body, structure, taste and quality of both the best and the worst wines, in several months or after 200 years.

When looking at Old World and New World wines, time comes into play at the very heart of the issue with seasons. The New World is a sunnier, warmer place - think South America, California and Australia, for instance. And, although autumn and winter may not be the best seasons to visit the Old World, France, Italy and Germany have cooler climates that allow grapes more time on the vine to develop colour and flavour.

Veraison - the process of grape ripening on the vine - generally takes about six weeks to reach 100 per cent when all the berries have changed colour. This gives winemakers time to plan the vintage and the consumer's enjoyment of the blend.

While time can be a winemaker's best friend or worst enemy, it is one of the most important fundamentals of wine making. It is also the difference between New World wines that are higher in alcohol content and richer in body, but do not display the finesse of flavour and elegance of top Old World vintages.

Maturation is also a factor of time and the most significant determinant of a wine's depth of character. For red wines especially, but also in the case of champagnes and white Burgundies, how long a wine spends in a barrel or oak cask will dictate the fermentation and oak levels. Want more oak? Find a wine that has been aged for longer. Want something fresher? Choose a wine that was bottled at the point of freshness just after fermentation.

Case in point: white wines such as Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier generally do not spend much time in the cask. They are bottled immediately after fermentation and sit for only a few months before being released to the market. Comparatively, some of the great Riojas from Spain, or sherry and port from Portugal, have a character that is a result of time alone, for the longer a wine sits in the cask, the more stable it is after bottling and the longer it will keep. Sherry can spend up to 40 years in a cask. It's worth the wait.

A recent discovery of champagne tells something of the same story. About 70 bottles of champagne estimated to be 200 years old were found in a shipwreck on the seabed of the Baltic Sea off Finland's Aland Islands. These precious bottles intended for a Russian tsar spent nearly two centuries at 50 metres under the sea, in arctic temperatures, exposed to very little light. And for the lucky few who have been able to sample a few millilitres of perhaps the world's oldest champagne still available, they were treated to perfectly preserved champagne.

Time can change colours from dark to light and from clear to opaque; it can change flavours from woody and dry to softer and silkier. Younger flavours are more punctuated and separate, whereas more mature wines present deep, mingled flavours that have blended together over time. And, while decanting can bring forward the aromas and flavours of a fine wine, leaving it too long can actually rob the wine of just these wonderful properties.

Recently at a tasting of Solaia wines from Italy with the Marchesi Antoniri family, the winemaker himself remarked that the oldest vintage - a Super Tuscan from the 70s - was incredibly alive in the glass, after all those years and within an hour and a half of decanting. This is the measure of exceptional quality.

But what does this mean about all the effort, expertise, love and attention that go into wine making? It means that the honest truth about the incredible beauty, elegance, structure and flavour of a vintage bottle of wine is this: it cannot be created by man alone.

There is no question that the foundations of a fabulous bottle of wine designed to last for decades - an old Mouton de Rothschild, a Chateau Lafite or a Chateau d'Yquem - are the product of exceptional skill and care. But it is also our friend, time.

It may not be the sexiest aspect of wine appreciation, but in the growing of grapes, the making of wine, the changing of flavours and structures, and in the measurement of fine wine, time is the benchmark of distinction.

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