Wine, like life, gets increasingly complex with age (or should do if you are able to cellar them for long enough). The problem is though far too many of our wines are not cellared. Now this maybe a problem to some but to most cellaring is something that their wine merchant or winery should be doing for them.
To get the maximum pleasure from wine it should have a few years age on it before consumption but as we head into the era of immediacy we care less and less about the length of time wine has been in the bottle.
Most of us have no idea what wines can be cellared and what wines should be drunk early. Well there are two sides to both stories and this is my side.
Wine should not be about whether or not you can drink it young or cellar it, but about representing the region and the season in which the grapes were grown. We do see little gems now and again of wines that truly represent the region and grape typicity but they are few and far between.
The most obvious example of this is Rippon Pinot Noir 2005/6 and Prophets Rock Pinot Noir. They represent Central Otago where the landscape is beautiful and fragrant with ripe fruit and a minerality that goes all the way from front palate to back.
Other wines from Hawke's Bay, Martinborough, Waipara, and Gisborne sing the same song but rarely do they from Marlborough, especially the Sauvignon Blanc. This wine can be bland and sugary that displays nothing of the year let alone the terrior.
2008 was more dire than many of the other vintages and with winemakers adding acid and all sorts of other nasty chemicals to make the stereotypical Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc compounded my feelings towards this region.
Don't get me wrong as there are some beautifully balanced Sauvignon Blanc's on the market from 2008 but a majority are starting to taste very similar.
My choice of Sauvignon Blanc is from wineries such as Dog Point, Two Rivers, Walnut Block, and Discovery Point. Each and every wine they make varies sightly depending on the year. This is what wine making should be about as little intervention as possible to let the environment speak rather than the big industrial monsters that churn out the Cola of the wine world.
Hopefully you will all be able to taste the aforementioned wines and enjoy them as much as I did and make life a little less ordinary.
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