The majority of wine made today is ready to drink within a year or less of being bottled. Great wines, however, is capable of evolving and improving for decades, and very occassionally centuries. Why?
When young, great wines contain an unresolved complex of acids and sugars, minerals and pigments, tannins, and all sorts of flavour compounds. Good wines have more of these things than ordinary wines, and great wines more than good wines. That is why, in the end, they have more flavour and character. But it takes time for these elements, the primary grape-derived aromas and the secondary ones of fermentation and in many cases oak, to interact, to resolve themselves into a harmonious whole, and for the distinct scent of maturity, called the bouquet, fo form. Time, and the action of small amounts of oxygen, gradually make wine mature.
A youthful fine red wine gose into bottle containing a mix of tannins, pigments, flavour compounds (these three known collectively as phenolics), and the more complex compounds formed by them. In the bottle, tannins continue to interact with pigments and acids to form new compounds and larger molecules which are eventually precipitated. This means that, as it ages, a fine red wine loses colour and astringency, but gains complexity and sediment.
# posted by Birdie @ 9:27 PM
