Echinosum
Posts: 604
Joined: 1/28/2021
From: Buckinghamshire, UK
Status: offline
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The reality of much (better quality) wine, both white and red, is that it has an attractive period for drinking in its relative youth, then becomes less attractive as it converts itself to the aged product, and finally blooms again for its magnificent maturity.
Drinking windows of year1-year2 fail to reflect this.
So you might see a window that computes as 3yo-20yo, for a mid-market syrah for example. But in reality it's (potentially) worth trying at 3-4yo for youthful impact. But then, if you have any patience, you won't touch it again until it is at least 8, as it will lose that youthful attractiveness and not yet have re-emerged in its magnificent maturity. In the interim, it can be rather dumb, or at least disjointed. These numbers are just examples. Dumb periods can start and/or end much later than in this example. And some wines are just too tough in their youth to be worth trying. It is often rather difficult to predict when a wine might re-emerge from a dumb phase, and it will depend on storage conditions. Owners of top 2005 clarets, for example, are often still waiting. People without patience may give a wine a long decant, several days even, to help it open out, or to understand how it is developing.
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