Cellared Wine as a Window to the Past
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Burgess Cellars’ vineyards in St. Helena, Calif.
Yet, as a gift, wine has undeniable advantages. Compact and portable, it’s also fun, offering more immediate pleasure than, say, a set of drill bits. And unlike a box of chocolates, it’s fat free.

So how can you give a wine that’s imbued with intention and significance? My suggestion: old wine. When it has been cellared, a wine becomes not just what’s with dinner, but an artifact, a slender bridge to the past.

“Think about what a vintage brings to the equation,” says Steve Burgess, whose family’s winery, Burgess Cellars in the Napa Valley, is perhaps the most copious retail source of great old wine in the United States. “Besides the obvious marking of dates like birth years and anniversaries, the simple act of reading the year on the bottle may take your mind somewhere else.”

Whether the wine is from 1999 or 1959, it’s hard not to pause contemplatively before uncorking it. And mature wine is often more interesting than when it was young. Youthful, bouncy fruit becomes burnished and tender; raw, punishing elements can harmonize and mellow. And all sorts of irresistibly savory flavors emerge like mushrooms after a rain.

The difficulty in giving older wine as a gift is twofold: finding it and paying for it.

There aren’t many well-aged wines around. Most American wineries sell all their wine on release, as our culture is one that tends to like its wines young. Furthermore, cellared wine is what they call “a nonperforming asset,” Mr. Burgess said, “not good for cash flow.”

The winery’s cost of cellaring the bottle is typically passed on to the customer. Prices are often exorbitant. But sometimes they can be a bit more affordable, under $70, as is the case with Burgess.

Founded in 1972 on the ankle of Howell Mountain by Tom Burgess, a pilot who developed a taste for old wine while shuttling around Europe, Burgess Cellars is now run by his son Steve.

While many wineries hold back a little wine for private consumption, few do so on the scale of Burgess, which, in 1980 started putting aside between 500 and 1,000 cases of cabernet a year for release a decade later. “He wanted people to have the opportunity, as he had in Europe, to taste how beautiful wine can become with age,” Steve Burgess said.

On Burgess’s Web site, 30 vintages are available. And make no mistake, the best option in buying older wine is to get it directly from the winery. The more a wine is moved the more quickly it ages. While there’s no telling how many times an old bottle in a shop has been moved and under what conditions, wines in Burgess’s “library” program are stored in ideal conditions until release. “If you see our ‘library selection’ sticker on the wine,” Mr. Burgess said, “it means that it has either never left our cellar or it’s only been shipped from us to the retailer at the time of its library release.”

Graceful aging is important. I recently popped a bottle of 1979 Burgess cabernet taken directly from the cellar, and it was pristine. A core of primary, fresh black cherry was still surprisingly strong, but it was garlanded with a bouquet of aged tobacco and forest floor. The texture was as smooth as satin.

The Burgess library program may be California’s most extensive, but it is not its only one. Freemark Abbey offers its Napa Sycamore cabernet in select vintages back to 1991. Corison has Napa cabernet vintages back to 1996. Josh Jensen of Calera bucks the cabernet trend by selling older pinot noir and chardonnay.

“No one believes pinot can age,” said Mr. Jensen, who each year makes available some vintages he thinks are showing well (currently, a ’94, ’96 and ’97). He doesn’t even bother to advertise his whites, noting that “people would sooner take a taste of rat poison than they would a 10-year-old chardonnay.”

Nevertheless, he libraries chardonnay, too — it’s available on request. (In fact, a well-made chardonnay ages beautifully, taking on notes of cream, honey, truffles and all sorts of other decadent flavors, a perfect accompaniment for a cheese course or with lobster and butter.)

There are plenty of reliable shops that have large selections of older wine. The Aged Cabernet Trust has a wide selection of California cabernet back to 1992. K & L, on its Web site, has it back to 1975 and Bordeaux back to 1942. Dee-Vine Wines carries a great selection of very old German riesling. The Rare Wine Co. offers Madeira as old as 1827.

But middlemen add to the cost, which makes buying from the winery appealing. Calera and Burgess use the same formula to compute the cost of cellaring — typically $3 per bottle per year is added to the original retail price. Sometimes it’s cheaper, though.

For instance, no wine after 1988 on Burgess’s list is priced higher than $68. These days that seems pretty reasonable for the opportunity to, in one magnanimous swoop, bestow both a moment of reflection and a sip of something supremely memorable.

Jordan Mackay is the author of “Passion for Pinot: A Journey Through America’s Pinot Noir Country” (Ten Speed Press, 2009).

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