“Let’s have a look in the cellar, shall we?” I suspect most wine collectors in the world got into it for the pleasure of uttering that sentence in the company of a fellow wine lover. Buying wine is often as much about the storing-up of future pleasure and the exercise of patience as it is about having something to drink with dinner.
But there’s been a shift in how people who buy wine for ageing actually do it. Gone are the days of laying down two or three dozen of something for posterity; tiny Burgundy allocations put paid to that. Now people buy in ones and twos and threes, and six-bottle cases have supplanted the dozen for many fine wine merchants. This makes the opening of a bottle a much more weighty decision and has probably decreased, proportionally, the amount of older wine in the secondary market compared to that at the start of the century.
In the long term, however, it is in wine’s interest to be able to offer consumers aged versions of itself. The evolution of wine over time is one of the unique things that it has to offer in the world of drinks. Unfortunately, given the pressures of cash flow in the modern wine world, this has not been enthusiastically prioritised. Yet it is a responsibility to the wine category that needs to be recognised, and it is as much the duty of producers as merchants or consumers.
Although in places such as Rioja and Montalcino a pre-release ageing is mandated to allow the wines to reach the consumer in a state of relative drinkability, the country that leads the world in ageing wines before release is Portugal. The colheita port of the Douro is — given the huge increase in the prices of old Madeira — now the most accessible way to discover the flavours of mature wine anywhere in the world.
On a recent visit to Kopke in the Douro, I was reminded of the treasure trove of wines piled up in its warehouses in Vila Nova di Gaia, passing serenely from one generation of cellarmaster to another. In discussion with Carlos Alves, the current winemaker in charge of this legacy of cask-aged port, I was humbled by the fact that he was still maintaining and bottling wine from barrels that were first filled before the Second World War. A taste of the 1935 white colheita was an extraordinary, resonant experience, particularly because it was in pristine condition.
Long valued in Portugal, colheita and tawny wines offer not only the unique flavours of age, but flawless cellaring and wide drinking windows, making them ideal for consumers to discover the flavour of aged wines. Although mature vintage port is available on the secondary market, these don’t come ex-quinta for the most part, and bottles vary widely in their condition. Colheita doesn’t have that drawback, being bottled on demand, making every bottle effectively ex-quinta.
Is it a sign of increasing high street interest in mature wine that some of Kopke’s old colheitas, including its singular whites, are now available in selected Waitrose branches? I hope so. It’s hard to think of a better way to encourage customers to spend £30 or £40 this Christmas and simultaneously support producers who are maturing their wines extensively before sale.
Sadly, the Douro needs to make the effort to attract a new generation of drinkers to port. Recently it has looked like simple rosé port might be just the ticket, but it would be a delicious irony if it turned out to be aged colheitas that actually pulled it off .
