What is the most important factor for wines to be able to age?

What is the most important factor for wines to be able to age?

We always wonder, why some wines can age for 20 years, or 30 years, or even longer, while other wines cannot age as well. All this despite being made from the same grape variety.

The answer to this lies in the most important ingredient in the wine that leads the wine to age, developing tertiary flavors after a few decades, which everyone appreciates.

That MOST important ingredient is ACIDITY in the Wine.

Acidity starts off high when the grapes just begin to ripen, and slowly decreases to lower levels as the grapes finish ripening.

The rate of acidity dropping depends on the climate. If it is a hot climate, the acidity drops at much faster rate and could even result in a wine that doesn't taste fresh even in the first few years of its life. In a cool climate the acidity rate of dropping is slow, so the more acidity is left over in the grapes even as those grapes complete ripeness.

So what makes Acidity so important to the aging of a wine for long period?

  • First of all Acidity acts as a preservative, maintains the wine's freshness and structure over a long period of time.
  • It protects against premature oxidation, and maintains vibrancy, and color over long periods of time.
  • It also shapes a wine's flavor profile during aging, such as highlighting and enhancing some of the flavor components while softening others.
  • As wines age, acidity can help in the appearance of secondary and tertiary aromas, such as nutty, earthy, leathery notes and many more, which wine lovers tend to appreciate.
  • It helps in the overall structural balance of the wine, for elements such as tannins (in red wines), sweetness, and fruitiness. This balance is important for a wine's aging potential so that everything ends up in harmony in the long run.
  • It provides vibrancy and freshness, so the wine does not  taste unbalanced or become flat as it ages.
  • Most importantly, it slows down the aging process, allowing the wine to to mature slowly for longer period, thereby allowing enough time for tertiary flavors such as earth, leather, etc to appear.
  • Acidity enhances the perception of aromas in wine which helps it to be appreciated when opened decades later.
  • In the long run, as the wine ages, the level of acidity is reduced, so therefore wines will taste less sour, become more balanced and the aged flavors can be appreciated even more.

Is that all that is needed? Just acidity and wines will become wonderful after they have aged for 20 years or so or above?

We cannot just depend on acidity, despite it is a necessity for the wines to age.

Since you would look for an aged wine to have good tertiary flavors such as earth, dried tobacco leaves, dried tobacco leaves, mushrooms, leather, etc, therefore you will need the wine to have a good flavor intensity to begin with.

This can only be achieved through a slow and long ripening timeline in a cool to moderate climatic environment.

Wines with a pronounced initial flavor intensity will have more capacity to change and develop during aging. These rich concentration of primary fruit flavors, can evolve into complex, tertiary aromas and flavors over time.

Finally we come to Tannin, which is definately important, but not necessity for aging of wines, as can be evidenced from white wines which can age for a long period of even 40 to 50 years, despite having very little tannin if any in them.

Tannin helps to protect the wine from oxidation, and the beauty is that they polymerize, a process where individual tannin molecules bind together to form larger, tannin structures and become a part of the sediments in wine. This process leads to a smoother wine once aged.

You can see in the glass below, sediments sticking to the sides of the glass, that includes tannin. It best to decant this older wines to separate these sediments from the wine before enjoying.

So can all types of grape varieties age for the same number of years if they have the above conditions of Acidity and Flavors?

When we talk about a wine being able to age, we actually mean that after a decade or two later, the wine is tasting pleasant and surprisingly even more interesting than when it was youthful as now there are developed tertiary flavors.

We would not want an aged wine that tastes unpleasant, or one that we do not enjoy due to deteriorated flavors.

Taking into consideration our expectations of aged wine to be one that is exciting and interesting, it is therefore can be said that, different grape varieties have different timeline that they can age for, after which they will decline.

So this is what we call varietal dependent number of years of aging capabilities.

So let me put this in a graph.

Let's assume the wines are made from single grape varieties, and they meet the above parameters such as the most important Acidity and Flavors, then the wine is considered to be of aging potential.

The individual grape aging capability would look like below on a graph:

So different grapes an age for different number of years, but they can only age and improve to a certain number of years, provided that their acidity has been well maintained, along with good intensity of flavors.

A big toast to aged wines!

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