What Is a Vintage Wine?

Video Transcript

"How to know your vintage wines. Vintage, what exactly is that? Vintage is the time, the year at which the grapes are picked. So, if we pick the grapes, this year, two thousand and eight, the vintage of the wine is two thousand and eight. Now why does this matter? Vintage matters for a number of reasons. The simplest is just to know when to drink your wine. Every single wine is vintaged. There's very few occasions when red wine or white wine is blended and there's no vintage. That often happens when you talk about table wines. However, every single wine and beyond that will be vintaged. So here we've got for example a Bordeaux, two thousand and five. And this Bordeaux is a Graves. So how does this work with regards to the vintage? First thing I want to say is that the grapes were harvested in the year two thousand and five, which actually happens to be a great vintage for Bordeaux, if not one of the best in ten, fifteen years. Now that you know what the vintage is, it determines what to do with your wine. Let's take a south of France wine with the year two thousand and five on it. Now these wines are often made to drink quite young so you would know if you ordered a year two thousand, if you have the year two thousand vintage, and it's now the year two thousand and eight, that that wine is almost past its drinkable drinking date. It's less fresh and less expensive and not at its best. So from here you can determine that from the vintage can determine when to drink your wine. Also with a vintage, you can use this to determine how long to keep your wine. Bordeaux classically, typically Bordeaux and Burgundy wines and some wines from the Pierre Monte region, Ciante, some of the Spanish wines like Rioja Reservas can be kept for ten, fifteen and in some cases like in Bordeaux, twenty, thirty years. So if you've got a top class Bordeaux, that's what we traditionally call a vintage wine, you can keep up to fifteen, maybe to fifty years like a Mouton Rothschild. So if it's a two thousand and five you don't expect to drink it until maybe year two thousand and twenty and beyond for very expensive Bordeaux wine. However, in outlying Bordeaux wine from two thousand and five, expect to drink it within the next five to eight years. So use the vintage to determine at the time at which you can drink the wine. Also, vintages are what the writers talk about. Every vintage is affected by weather, by basically by the climatic conditions. Some years are good years some years are bad years. Where wines are to keep, it's important to know the vintage in which they were harvested. For example, again coming to one of the great years, two thousand and five, you're pretty safe across all of Bordeaux to keep that wine for anything from five to fifty years depending on the quality of the estate. If it had been a bad year, let's say as an example, off the top of my head, maybe two thousand and three, Ciante's a bad year. Then you know those wines were maybe exposed to a warmer climate so there's less structure in them. So you'd actually have to drink them quite young. So a connoisseur would know that. O.k., that wine is drinkable, but we'll drink it young. We won't keep it, because if we keep it, it will have no structure, no fruit within ten years time, at even five years time. So vintage is a good reference point to show you when to drink your wine. That's the good definition for vintage and then there's a vintage wine which are wines which are high quality and they're aged. So classically, typically we'd say a vintage Mouton Rothschild, and there you're talking about a completely different issue. You're talking about a wine that's going to be laid down for a long time where it's always called a vintage wine. And we use that as a way to distinguish it from an ordinary wine. When you're working with fine wine and ports for example, our vintage ports, and every port is a vintage and all the fine wines have vintages on them. To find those vintage information go to vintage table that tell you the conditions under which the wines were harvested, whether they're going to be great wines or everyday wines. Most good quality websites will have a vintage chart on them and good writers like Jancis Robinson, Hugh Johnson, English writers, have got vintage charts in their books. Use those as references as to when to drink wines and as to how to buy vintage wine. That's how you know your vintages."