Types of Aging -- Types of Maturity

I’m an amateur du vin (fr: lover of wine) fascinated by the aromas and flavours of time.

Partly, I’m fascinated by processes – many of them still mysterious – which, take a wine’s hand and lead it from one stage towards another.
Partly, I’m beguiled by thoughts: there are different ways of aging... there are many types of maturity... time can do more than just make us older... (maybe) there are ways to spend time so that we never regret growing old.

The majority of wines are intended for relatively early consumption (between 10 and 24 months after harvest). These wines are essentially fermented grape juice which has been blended to offer a pleasing flavour profile. They are bottled soon (months) after fermentation. They may have been stabilized (flash pasteurization, for example) to increase their lifespan. In any case, the flavour profile bottled is (hopefully) the flavour profile consumed.
Some of these wines aim to capture the delight of freshness and youth, fruit and flowers. Beaujolais is the most obvious example of such a wine. Its sibling, Beaujolais Nouveau, takes the approach to a (once) fashionable extreme.
Other wines in this category are designed to include flavours borrowed from their aged cousins. Oak chips can give an illusion of time spent resting in barrels.

The majority out of the way, let’s turn to the minority: wines in which the passing of time is essential.

Some wines are intended to be aged for years (or even decades) in bottle. Such wines, when mature, are hardly the same wine that was bottled. Over time, fresh fruit (and often oppressively astringent tannins), may become a complex of dried fruits, forest floor, game meat, cigar box, wet earth, compost. That the chemistry of bottle aging is barely understood just embellishes the magic of a cellar. Its too bad – in this day of apartments, central heating, and mobile life/career styles – that the household cellar is rather rare.

Champagnes (and any sparkling wines made by the same “traditional method”) are created with a different type of bottle aging.
In Champagne, a dry wine is bottled along with a dose of yeast and sugar. These bottles are sealed, and left for the yeast to (re)start fermentation. Taking place in a sealed bottle (rather than an open vat), all the byproducts are trapped in the wine. Carbon dioxide dissolves (released later as bubbles). Dead yeast cells (more appealingly referred to as lees) slowly settle to the bottom. As time is allowed to pass, the wine takes on new flavours: biscuit, toast, malt, even milk-chocolate. Eventually, the lees are removed (“disgorged”) from the bottle. (How do they get the lees out of the bottle?... that’s a question for another day)

Some wines spend time on their lees (sur lie) before being bottled.
One (particularly lovely) variation has been learned from Burgundy. Rather being transferred from vat to barrel, a white wine can be fermented in its barrels. When fermentation finishes, the wine is left to rest on its lees which have settled to the bottom. With time – and with or without periodic stirring (fr: battonage) – the wine drifts towards new and fuller flavours, and a richer texture.

Many wines spend an extended time aging before bottling.
This time may be passed in oak barrels, stainless steel tanks or concrete vats.
Some of this time is spent before any blending. This gives the winemaker a better sense of where each component is heading.
A young wine can then be given further time before bottling. Different vessels – new or old oak barrels of various sizes, inert stainless steel – have their own influence on a developing wine. But as time itself passes, changes which will continue later in bottle begin here: tannins soften, colours fades, flavour profiles begin to shift.
The amount of time allowed to pass is a matter of taste, and controversy. Wines like Gran Reserva Rioja (Northern Spain), Brunello di Montalcino (Tuscany), and some red Bordeaux (France) are aged for years before bottling. Against “modern” tastes (and the bottom line) which are pushing wines out of the cellar sooner, old world wines are protected by legal minimums. (For example, for a wine to be sold Brunello di Montalcino, it must have spent a minimum of 3 years in barrel).

Over time, any wine in barrel will inevitably be slightly oxidized. In the wines discussed just above – barrels of which junior cellar hands kept topped up – oxidation is very slow. A few other wines locate themselves along a spectrum in which oxidation plays a greater and greater role in maturity. Tawny-aged Ports may stretch time in barrel to decades. Many VinSanto (Tuscany) are sealed in barrel for years. The wine slowly evaporates as time passes; the empty space (ullage) in each barrel – and with it the influence of oxygen – grows. Finally, Oloroso (traditionally, but not exclusively, in southern Spain) is made by deliberately leaving its base wine exposed to the air. Time turns an oloroso through deep amber to brown... until those years smell of nuts, raisins and spice.

A very few wines mature below a layer of yeast. This coat – often called flor – is fed by the wine. In return, it protects a maturing wine from oxygen while passing on its own flavours to its host. Manzanilla, made this way, is a crisp dry white wine which smells strongly of seaside-air and rising bread dough.

Finally, one last type of maturity. Normally, wines age gently in cellars where, kept cool, time seems to flow slowly. Casks of Madeira – fortified wines produced on an island of the same name – are deliberately exposed to the island’s subtropical heat. Such treatment – aging gone haywire – which would be fatal for almost any other wine, renders Madeiras almost indestructible. Strangely, as if time on Madeira stretches and contracts like a rubber band: even a relatively young Madeira tastes mature beyond its years... and yet, some of these wines are capable developing – at an inconceivably slow pace – for a century or more.

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As usual, here are some suggestions (currently available in Ontario) for those who would like to explore:

More than just bubbly wine... taste what the lees left behind:
Lanson “Black Label” non-vintage Champagne. $45
Henry of Pelham “Cuvee Catherine Brut” Ontario sparkling wine. $30


Two wines from beneath a layer of flor:
Gonzalez-Bypass “Tio Pepe” Fino Sherry. $15
Chateau Chalon “Reserve Chatherine de Rye 1986” Vin Juane. $70 (600ml)


Wines fully oxidized:
Alvear. “Asuncion Oloroso”. $21 (500ml)
Gonzalez-Bypass. “Matusalem Oloroso Dulce”. $25 (375ml)


From casks left out in the heat:
Blandy’s 5yr Bual Madeira. $22
Pfeiffer. Rutherglen Muscat. $15 (500ml)

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. . . just because it cracks me up:
“Getting old ain’t for sissies” (Betty Davis)