Back again, with pleasure. I enjoyed the discussion of manipulation, although I feel we barely scratched the surface of perhaps the most vital topic of the moment and would like to take it up again at some point. Meanwhile, have been pondering another aspect of our favorite subject.

          I recently braved spiders and bats to get a grip on the shamble of crates and loose glass I call a wine cellar. By the time I gave up I’d unearthed a couple of cases worth of orphan bottles, along with some wines I bought in flusher times and haven’t tasted for awhile. I’ve been opening them at random, and it’s been pretty interesting.

For example, a ’78 Summit Lake Zin was at the end of the line, yet still extremely enjoyable. It was like looking at something through the long end of the telescope. It was smaller than it had been, but not distorted—it still looked like itself. The plump and luscious fruit I remember from the wine’s youth (and mine) had fallen away to reveal its essential elements: real terroir, minerality, soil, echoes of ripe grapes.

          Was it nearly a ghost after 31 years? Most definitely. Had it lost its essential beauty? Definitely not. Let’s fall back on the old movie star analogy. Paul Newman in his 70s, selling cookies and salad dressing, did not look exactly like Butch Cassidy or Hud. But he still looked great, like a good-looking old man who had been extraordinarily handsome in youth. More to the point, the elements of his youthful beauty were still apparent. He looked a lot like the young Paul Newman, only older. Same with the ’78 Summit Lake.

I had a similar experience a few years ago with a 1921 Pol Roger. It was an incredible Champagne experience despite the fact, or perhaps because, it gave up its ghost within minutes. Why drink a doddering old Champagne when a young one is so wonderful? To quote my own column in the LA Times, “It was not a young wine, no longer fresh. But it was alive, with a measured effervescence and a taut, if somewhat ethereal focus. Even beneath the descending weight of its age, evident in the tawny gold hue and rich toasted nut aromas and flavors, it was brilliant, razor-sharp, balanced on a pinpoint. The glass exuded dignity, wisdom, and a kind of autumnal sadness. We were transported; discussion could wait.” (Read the whole column here if you have nothing better to do: http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jan/19/food/fo-55273 )

          Closer to home, I was happily surprised by a Rodney Strong Zinfandel, Knotty Vines 2000, Sonoma County. Not a wine I would expect to age in an interesting way, and yet it was wonderful, fresh yet mellowed in the same way that a dry-aged Porterhouse is wonderful—every bit itself, and itself intrinsically fine, yet altered by time. On the other hand, Silver Pinot Noir, Lake Marie Vineyard 2001 (Santa Barbara) seemed promising but turned out to be oddly flat and syrupy, with a remote taste of chlorine (from watering back with city water, perhaps?)

          And brace yourselves for my tasting notes on ’95 Lynch-Bages: “Perfect Bordeaux, let’s grill lamb tonight.”

All that got me thinking about aging: how and why wines age, whether there’s any virtue in a wine that age has rendered more interesting but perhaps not more enjoyable, whether ageworthiness indicates an ability to maintain youthful characteristics for a long time or a mystical capacity for metamorphosis, and whether anyone cares about aging wines anymore.

          When I first got involved with wine, the second thing that attracted me (after the gleaming allure of regional typicity and, dare I say it, terroir) was the idea that wine is a living thing with a life of its own.

          As luck would have it, my descent into winedom coincided with my brief acting career, and good ol’ Shakespeare provided plenty of fodder for my new fascination. During one memorable run of Henry IV, Part 2, in which I played Falstaff, the stage manager (a fellow novice wine geek) filled my prop flask with a different mystery wine each night, which culminated in my spraying the shocked front row with Ridge Zin during a particularlarly passionate reading of the line, “If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be to foreswear thin potations, and to addict themselves to sack!”

          More to the point, the Bard gave me metaphorical language for what I percieved as wine’s most mystical property, its transmutation in the bottle over time. When I played Jacques in Love’s Labor Lost, I delivered the “Seven Ages of Man” soliloquy while visualizing Chateau Latour ’67, which was then just shy of ten years old and, I thought, at the Lover age, “sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ brow.”

          That early gift keeps giving. Just the other night we drank a ’93 Pommard-Pezerolles (Ballot-Millot) and I found myself thinking of Ariel’s song, “of his bones are coral made, those are pearls that were his eyes, nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange.” (A positive comment, by the way.)

          The thing is, that kind of experience seems to have gone by the wayside in recent years. I frequently hear ***-swinging wine geeks brag about old wines they’ve had, and the observation is almost always to the effect that the wine was either “still drinkable” or “over the hill.” Several times recently I’ve tried to engage people at dinner parties on the subject of an older wine being poured, and it’s been frustrating because there hasn’t seemed to be any interest in describing the experience of the wine. It’s always devolved to how it competes with other wines in the longevity department. Has anyone else had a similar—or opposite—experience?

          I find myself thinking that what’s been lost is not so much an ability to percieve the unique beauty of a fine wine in different phases of its life, but the ability to think about and talk about it.

          It also strikes me that ageability is no longer as important as it once was. Has there been a sea change in the vinous paradigm, equivalent, say, to the relatively new vogue for syrupy, high-alcohol wines (which, to my taste, don’t so much age as decay)? As we know, most wine is consumed relatively soon after it’s made. A lot of the manipulations we discussed in the last thread are aimed at early drinkability. And the all-important scores are generally obtained by wines that grab the taster’s attention upon commercial release, fresh out of a newly-opened bottle or even a barrel.

          So, I’m curious. Is age-worthiness still a viable value? And what wines currently exemplify that?

Also, what do you think happens to a wine as it ages? How does a Mosel or Eden Valley riesling age, compared to a Sancerre or a Mersault? What about Bordeaux, and how does that compare to a Napa Valley cabernet?

And would it be fair to paraphrase Jacques--“And one wine in its time plays many parts, its acts being seven ages?”