Old wine

I have just finished reading The Billionaire’s Vinegar, an enlightening account by Benjamin Wallace on the fraudulent aging of wine, the old wine market and the determination of the market value and age of old wine.

In 2001, the rare and old wine market was flooded with 100-year old bottles of first growths. Wine has proven to be one the easier collectibles to imitate.  To artificially “age” wine, simply find an authentically old (even if empty) bottle of the required vintage and chateau and fill it with wine or even colored water.  Few if any experts know what these wines should taste like and many bottles are bought, not to be drunk but as investments.  But the value of an investment depends on the buyer’s confidence that he is buying and can eventually resell “the real thing”.   Proof of a wine’s provenance and age can be virtually impossible. The so-called Jefferson bottles are one example.  Reputedly discovered in a blocked up and forgotten cellar in Paris, the first of these bottles, a 1787 bottle of Chateau Lafitte etched with the initials Th.J, was sold at auction by Christies in 1985 for $156,000 to Malcolm Forbes.  Not so much as a bottle of fine wine but for a collection of Jefferson and other American founding father memorabilia. No record of these particular bottles were mentioned by Thomas Jefferson in his obsessively kept records. The search by one of the collectors, Bill Koch of Koch Industries, to validate his acquisition for hundreds of thousands of dollars of several Jefferson bottles proved inconclusive.  Bottles left to age in chateau cellars have long been reconditioned and topped up, using different, less rare vintages.  In the past, buyers could return a bottle to have them recorked, thus “validating” their provenance.  This practice has now been abandoned.

Several techniques based on radioactive dating are available to determine age but all are based on man-made radioactivity and its rise with the nuclear age.  Most require opening the bottle (and thus destroying its value).  One such analysis of an 1787 Lafitte Jefferson bottle was done on the campus of GSF-Forschungszentrum fur Umwelt und Gesundheit in Munich.   Thermoluminescence determinations showed that the sediment was 220 years old plus or minus 92 years, meaning it came from a vintage between 1680 and 1864.  However, measurements of tritium levels (low before 1945 and the first atomic detonations) or carbon-14 levels revealed a wine which could be dated to 1962.  A germanium detector, capable of measuring the presence and reactions of subatomic particles called neutrinos, is capable of measuring the level of cesium-137 in unopened bottles.  Philippe Hubert, the inventor of the detector, and Bernard Medina of the French agency charged with “fraud repression” carried out tests on 4 Jefferson bottles in a Bordeaux laboratory.  No significant presence of Ce-137 was found.  The wine in the bottles was older than 1952, but how much older could not be determined.

In “Bottles for the sink”, an article published in the local newspaper Sud-Ouest (26 january 2010), César Compadre interviewed Jean-Christophe Lucquiaud.  Few bottles really improve with time and many wines stored in private cellars are undrinkable, according to Jean-Christophe, who estimates the commercial value of such wines. Nearly all rosé and dry white wines should be drunk within two years after bottling.  The less expensive red wines (5 to 10 euros a bottle), unlike the great dry red and dry or sweet white wines, are not expected to improve with age.  Wines can improve with age only if the storage conditions include the correct cool and even temperature and humidity.   (It is generally agreed that cool and even temperatures slow the growth of noxious bacteria while humidity keeps the cork from drying out).  The Bordeaux vintages dated 1987, 1992 or 1993 should be drunk rapidly.  We are reminded that the techniques for prolonging the cellar life of bottled wines were developed after the 1980s.

We have a cellar with bottles dating back one or two generations.  The older bottles were rescued from the cellar of Alain’s maternal great-aunt one day in the nineteen seventies when her cellar was flooded.  Over the years we opened a few bottles to share with knowledgeable friends and were sometimes pleasantly surprised.  The bottles had been kept in anything but correct conditions.  The level of wine in some of the bottles were low, having evaporated through the porous cork.  We know that the higher the level, the more likely the wine will be drinkable.  Dark purple precipitates were more or less abundant, with one bottle having lost most of its color.  The originally red wine was a pinkish yellow !  As expected, the sweet sauternes were the best preserved.  Corks which when removed smell moldy are bad signs for the wine within.  Most of our old wines had lost bouquet and alcohol and the wine was usually faded and tired.  Old wine connoisseurs such as Broadbent wax poetic about the “sweetness of death”.   These old wines predate the American rootstocks (pre-phylloxera wines), have not been artificially clarified (with egg whites), and the vines producing them have not been treated with chemical insecticides and fungicides.  They would be expected to be quite different from the more recent vintages.  I have decided to carry out an inventory of our old bottles and plan to do a more informed tasting one day.

Can Clos Ganda improve with age ?

All of our vintages were made with short (7 and in later vintages up to 14 days) maceration.  During this time, tannins and phenols from skin and seeds are extracted.  The longer the maceration time and the more frequent the “punching down” of cap, the more tannins and phenols are extracted.  Removal of jacks ensures that the more bitter tannins and vegetative aromas are reduced.

The molecular changes that occur in a sealed bottle of wine involve the gradual interaction of oxygen and wine.  Tiny amounts of oxygen (the “micro oxygenation” of Michel Rolland) are thus beneficial but too much will destroy the wine.  Antioxidant tannins protect wines from excessive oxidation.  Once they clump together and fall out, the wine loses its fruity character, is said to leach out and is “faded” at best or maderized at worst.  A wine is considered mature when flavor possibilities are maximized but not yet deteriorated.  The time it takes depends on the amount of tannin : more tannic wines take longer to reach maturity than less tannic wines.  Once maturity is reached, the time before death depends on the storage conditions.  Coolness of the cellar decelerates chemical reactions.  Humidity and horizontal storage keep the cork moist and maintains a seal against oxygen.  Large bottles age more slowly than smaller ones.  Wines with high alcohol, high sugar and high acid live longer because these conditions inhibit bacterial growth.

Vertical tastings.  A series of vintages of the same wine is called a flight :  we now have a five year flight 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.  We have done short 3-year flights (2006, 2007, 2008) of Clos Ganda, starting as is customary with the youngest.  After one year, the wine is already drinkable but improves after a second year in the bottle.  It will be interesting to see what the wine is like after a third year.