An interesting article by Martin Moran published in the Sunday Times on 6 January 2018, explaining that rather than going to the gym, you should switch from drinking beer to drinking wine… or something like that !
The white wine diet
Tag: Champagne
Too old for the job ?
Keeping your prized possessions for good is something I have a tendency to do instead of enjoying them in the moment. So if you are a hoarder, then listen up !
While in general all wines tend to get better and smoother with age in the bottle, it does not mean that you can keep them forever. There is an optimum cellaring period.
Three factors come into play:
- The storage conditions: it needs to be dark, not too hot or cold, with no wild temperature swings, a good level of moisture and above all no vibrations !
- The quality: better quality wines and/or wines from a better year will tend to do better and live longer than others
- The type of wine: the country, area and grapes used, but funnily enough, above all the colour !!
All things being equal, in descending order of longevity, we find: red wines, white wines and sparkling wines. Champagne in particular does retain its sparkle for long.
As a rule of thumb, 10 years should be considered a maximum to keep a bottle of good champagne. Lesser quality champagne will start to “madeirise”: become darker and start tasting sweeter like Madeira wine after a few years of bad cellaring and also lose some of their fine bubbles.
It becomes a question of statistics, the longer you leave it, the worst your chances are. This is why you see people opening an old case of red wine bottles and getting 4 fabulous bottles and 8 bottles of poor vinegar !
So it was with apprehension that we opened this bottle of 2002 vintage champagne recently, after 16 years in the bottle. I was lucky and it was excellent but it could have easily been otherwise.
The moral of the story is: drink you champagne early before it becomes too old and unreliable !