I was looking at my wine collection the other day. At any given time I have between two and three hundred bottles of wine in my posession. So earlier this summer when I was taking part in an online tasting – Drink Your Support which was organized by Miroki Tong (@9ouncesplease). This featured the wines from Seaside Pearl located in BC. I was invited to take part in the tasting, and I had the opportunity to talk about their Syrah. It’s become routine when I’m writing about wine to take a best guess as to when is the best time to open it. For the Seaside Pearl Syrah I guessed it would take two or three years for the tannin in the wine to soften and really bring the wine together…
But what the hell am I talking about? To be honest I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I started collecting wines. But I know with my focus on Ontario some of the wines I started collecting early in my writing career were Trius Red, Henry of Pelham Baco Noir, Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon from Lailey, and Poetica. I began writing about wine in 2010, and I do still have a few bottles from my early career kicking around. It’s not for lack of trying. When you’re new to the world of wine it’s exciting to sip on every bottle you get your hands on.
During the Seaside Pearl tasting when I was going through my tasting note it was brought to my attention that a couple of the panelists had no wine collection (yet). So after the tasting I reached out to Miroki to see if she wanted to start up a collection. What we are going to do is pick up a couple of bottles each month – taste through them – and then decide when we SHOULD open them again. Welcome to Cellar It?
Now when it comes to building a wine collection there are a lot of questions… Let’s start with “Do you even like old wine?”. I can tell you from my experience I’m not a fan of very old wine. I have had an opportunity to taste Rioja from 1964, and Bordeaux from 1973 – neither one of those bottles really moved me. When wines get older – they don’t necessarily get better – they evolve. And I think with everything I’m about to write – I am generalizing – as every wine evolves differently. There are so many factors that affect how a wine will age – variety, region, vintage condition, winemaking techniques, tannin, acid, sugar, alcohol content. So when deciding how long to hold a bottle it’s an audit on all of the previous factors.
Now you’ll take note that I didn’t mention price. While most top end cellar worthy wines do cost an arm and a leg – that doesn’t mean you can’t start your collection with some more affordable bottles. My podcast co-host Michael Pinkus has a 2000 bottle plus collection of wines that vast majority cost under twenty dollars. Frankly, raiding his cellar is a lot more fun than betting the farm on a single bottle – we usually grab 4 or 5 when we get together and one or two are almost always guaranteed to steal the show. So the focus of this project is going to be keeping the wines around the twenty dollar mark – with a few dollars here or there.
While I don’t like old wines – I do like wines when they hit a stage of having some finesse. I have a soft spot in my heart for warmer climate Cabernet Sauvignon (Chile and California if we’re being specific). I’ve learned the hard way from opening bottles young that the tannin in these wines are deceptive. You can enjoy your first few sips and feel the wines are velvet smooth, but then the tannin just sneaks up on you and the texture of these wines is … not pleasant. When I visited Robert Mondavi winery I had a change to drink some very fine bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon that had a few years under their belts to see how these wines just sing out of the glass and slide off the back of your tongue once the tannin has a chance to settle.
It takes a lot of patience, and a bit of hope when you’re building your cellar. But my philosophy with the bottles I’m saving is to open them sooner rather than later. I have managed to keep some bottles of Chateau La Confession from St Emilion in my collection for ten years. But if you read any notes on this site that say open in 5-7 years – count on André having opened them in 5. If you open a bottle of wine too early, you can still beat it into submission by putting it into a decanter, or just setting the bottle aside for an extra hour or two. But if you’ve held a bottle too long and the flavours have shifted to dry fruit, and leather… and you’re not a fan of that … there’s no getting it back.
The first bottle of wine we are going to explore is the 2017 Domaine La Décelle Réserve Valréas. It’s a southern Rhone blend of 50% Syrah and 50% Grenache. It’s a 17$ bottle available from the LCBO – the Rhone offers tremendous value. I mentioned I’m a big fan of warm climate Cabernet Sauvignon – the same goes for Syrah. Check out the video to see how long you should hold onto this bottle.
