Have a growing collection of wines and not sure what to drink and what to cellar? Or maybe you’d like to buy some wine to age? It’s not easy knowing how long a wine will last. Not to worry, below you’ll find guidelines to help you known when to cellar wine and when to drink it. Reality Of Most Wine There is good and bad news. The good news is that you probably haven’t accidentally drank wine that you were suppose to cellar. The bad news is that age worthy wine isn’t particularly common. In fact most wine (I’d even speculate as much as 99% of wine, see trends in wine) is meant to be drank young. Only a tiny fraction of wine is actually designed to stand up to and improve with aging. 99% of all wine should not be cellared. For the most part wineries take the guess work out of aging by handling it during production. This gives you a ready-to-drink product that doesn’t require any additional time in the cellar. This comes with the side effect that most wine will actually start to deteriorate if aged!

what is the best wine to cellar? Check out this infographic of which wines cellar the best. It includes examples of both red and white wines. How Long to Cellar Wine (infographic) When To Cellar Wine Basic Structure of Wine So if most wine doesn’t age well; then what exactly allows a wine to withstand the test of time? The science behind why a wine ages is often misunderstood and convoluted by marketing. The funny thing is, most people don’t know. We know how the structure of wine effects how long it will last. The sugar levels, tannins, acidity and alcohol influence how the wine ages. However, none of these elements by themselves can guarantee a wine will actually improve with age! Certainly some winemakers have earned a reputation for creating wine worth aging, additionally, certain regions and certain types of wine age better than others. This usually comes with a high demand and cost. Every year professionals speculate as to the age-worthiness of vintages, producers and regions.

Sometimes they are right, many times they underestimate or miss wines/vintages altogether. Ignore all the speculation and marketing blowhards. If you’re just getting started, don’t bother buying these ‘collectable’ wines and cellaring them. Investing in Wine for Profit If you’re reading this guide for advice then the above headline is misleading. It wouldn’t be fair of me to write a broad overly-simplified guide and pass it off as useful. Instead, I’m going to recommend a different philosophy – invest in wine for fun. How rewarding would it be to build a private collection of your favorite wines? The worst case scenario is that you amass a collection of wine you love and you’re forced to drink it. When investing in wine for profit, consider storing your wine at a professional wine storage. The benefit to using a professional wine storage facility is two-fold: it will help endorse the provenance of your bottles and it will expose you to potential buyers.

Which Wines to Cellar?buy canadian ice wine uk Most wines worth cellaring are considered premium wines. best value wine boxes ukExpect them to cost at least $30 a bottle. best wine italy 2014That’s not to say all expensive wine cellars well, but rather that well crafted wine usually comes at a cost.best bc wine under 15 You should cellar premium wines ‘that you love so much you have to buy it’ by the case. best wine label copyBuy enough wine like this and you’ll find you have too much to drink and will need to start storing it. best budget red wine 2015 uk

But wait, how will you know if it’s worth storing?best wine to gift someone The smart approach is to buy direct from the winery and talk to them about the wine and how long they think it will last. best 24 wine coolersThey can definitely give you a good baseline for an expiration date. top wine picks 2013 Now the fun part, drink the wine you’re cellaring. Yup, you should try a bottle every 6-12 months and see how it’s evolving. If you put it in a cellar and ignore it for too long, you’re going to miss out on it growing up. Who knows, you might stumble upon a vintage that turns out to be a gem in the rough at an unexpected time! Take a Free Wine Class Had success aging wine? Tell us what you’re storing below! Do you like this post?

DOES WINE ALWAYS improve with age? In most cases the answer is probably no. Outside of the rarefied world of fine wine—as shorthand that includes anything above £10 a bottle—it's safe to assume you can take your wine home and pull the cork, or twist the screw cap. When this subject comes up, I am reminded of the words of one of my first wine mentors, who, on the topic of decanting, would emphasize that most wines are designed to be... Anxiety Disorder: Is There an Escape? Film Trailer: 'The Hitman's Bodyguard' What Canadians Think of Trump's Tough Talk on Nafta Urban Farming With the Leafy Green Machine 'Rich Dad' author Robert Kiyosaki on how to get rich in real estateMy greatest wine dream—and I'll bet it's yours, too—was a wine cellar. Not just the actual cool-temperature space, but one that was filled. I dreamed of a cellar so full that I could easily forget about whole cases of wine for years at a time, the better to let them age to a fantasized perfection.

That dream came true. It took me years—decades, really—to achieve. And it cost me a disproportionate amount of my limited and precious discretionary income, especially when I was only just starting out as a writer. I was motivated, obsessed even, by a vision of what might be called futuristic beauty. How soaringly beautiful it would be in 15 or 20 years!But I wouldn't be right for today. Surely me, of course. I've had decades of wine drinking to discover that my fantasized wine beauty only rarely became a reality. But I had to find that out for myself. And I'm glad I did. But it isn't all personal, either. In recent years it's become obvious that an ever greater number of wines that once absolutely required extended aging no longer do. Simply put, most of today's fine wines—not all, mind you—will reach a point of diminishing returns on aging after as few as five years of additional cellaring after release. Stretch that to a full 10 years of additional aging and I daresay you will have embraced fully 99 percent of all the world's wines, never mind how renowned or expensive.

I can hear you already. What about this famous red Bordeaux? Or that fabled red Burgundy? What about grand cru Chablis? Or a great Brunello di Montalcino? Well, what about them? Yes, all of those wines and still others, such as German and Alsatian Rieslings, Napa Valley Cabernets and Hungarian Tokajis, reward aging. But let me tell you something: With only a handful of ultratraditionalist exceptions, the modern versions of even these wines don't require anywhere near as much aging as their forebears. This doesn't mean that today's versions of these wines are lesser. Rather, it's that fine wines have universally changed, sometimes radically so. And our tastes have changed, too. Today, we're consistently presented with red wines—especially the greatest, most exalted and expensive examples—that are annually crafted from uniformly ripe grapes, thanks to "green harvests." A green harvest is when, a month or so before the actual harvest, less-ripe clusters are eliminated.

These unwanted clusters are literally thrown on the ground. Green harvesting is an utterly new phenomenon in wine history. Really, it was unknown before the 1980s and didn't become near-universal until well into the 1990s. The modern rigor of "green harvesting" should not be underestimated in its effect. It has transformed the quality of fine red wines nearly everywhere, ensuring more uniformly ripe grapes with rounder, softer, finer tannins. (I'm not talking here about today's ultraripe late picking, which is another matter altogether.) Of course, cleaner winemaking, more scrupulous attention to fermentation methods that minimize tannins, more careful filtering and a host of other winemaking and cellaring techniques (not least, the ubiquity of small oak barrels) have also dramatically transformed wines. The bottom line: Today's wines are far more drinkable, far more gratifying, far more rewarding when drunk younger than their counterparts of 20 years ago. Can they age as long?

Yes, I think they can. But that's not the issue. Rather, the key question is: Do they need to? Only a very small handful of even the best wines truly require more than five years aging—10 years tops—in a cool space. Because while many of today's wines can easily age far longer than that, the issue is not endurance. And because of the reasons cited previously, we're now able to see that desired transformation sooner in a wine's lifespan. Will the transformation continue? In many cases, yes. But it does reach a point—and sooner than was once traditional—of diminishing returns. The critical element is that where once we had to wait patiently to get even a glimmer of initially hidden depths (thanks to harsh tannins, unwanted oxidation and unclean flavors), modern wine offers us a fuller, richer, more rewarding view sooner. Think of an old oil painting carefully and respectfully cleaned of an obscuring varnish, allowing both color and texture to leap out almost three-dimensionally, and you've got it.

Of course there are wines today that stubbornly withhold their favors, such as Vintage Port and those few white wines that do not go through malolactic fermentation, such as Trimbach Rieslings, Mayacamas Vineyards Chardonnay or the white Burgundies of Maison Louis Jadot. Such white wines, which retain all of their hard malic acid, unsoftened by malolactic, or secondary, fermentation, structurally require a lot more aging before they even approach something akin to maturity. The malic acid serves to slow aging and makes the wine less approachable in youth. But such wines are outliers. Even traditionally formidable wines, such as Barolo, are far more drinkable and genuinely rewarding younger than ever in their long history. One other aspect of cellaring wine must be recognized. We are emotionally invested in cellaring wines. If we've been patient a long time in hopes of a better wine future, then the long-aged, long-anticipated wine surely must be better for the wait.

This was never put better than by the great English wine writer P. Morton Shand (1895–1960) who, uncharacteristically for an upper-class Englishman of his era, loathed Vintage Port: "A properly matured Port is rightly considered unequalled as the test of the pretensions of a county family to proper pride, patient manly endurance, Christian self-denial, and true British tenacity." I do own (and buy) wines that would very likely further transform with more than five years aging. But I now increasingly find that the additional time is more "valuable" than the sensory return on that investment. My hard-won experience with aging wines has now answered to my satisfaction the question about the absolute need for long aging; namely, that the great majority of wines today, in the great majority of vintages, don't really reward that "expensive" extra five or 10 years beyond the five or 10 years of aging you've already bestowed. I am now convinced that today's wine lover is well advised to buy fine wines, cellar them in a cool space for five years—10 years, tops—and then drink them in secure confidence that the great majority of their full-dimensional goodness is available to you.