| Some Myths and Misunderstandings of Red Wine |
| All Store Long Long then GOOD!! People always have the misunderstanding that all wines MUST be kept for a number of years before they could be opened for drinking. This is a common myth!! Just go flip through any book on wine appreciation and you would understand what I mean. The fact is that most wines you normally see are simply made just to be drunk immediately. This is because they already taste best the moment you take them off the shelf, and since they already taste best, why should you store them further? In fact, storing young wines over 5 years would DECREASE their quality and make them more stale and uninteresting! Hence thinking that you are making it taste better, you are actually spoiling your wine! This is especially true of the French wine Beaujolais (Boh Joe lay) which is best when they are fresh and newly produced from the winery (Beaujolais Nouveu). As a rule of thumb, wines you bought should be drunk within five years of their vintage (year that the wine is produced) or its taste would deteriorate. So drink them ASAP... don't wait too long! On the other hand, well, there are of course wines that need to be stored for a very long time before they are at their peak of their tastes. But the catch is that these wines are usually the high-end expensive ones that can cost anything between $50 to a million dollars! Yes, these wines are specially produced for storage purposes! In fact, you can rarely find these wines anywhere in Singapore except in some speciallized wine shops that collect and sell specially ordered wines. Furthermore, I don't think it is easy for beginners to know them by specific names or have the money to invest in the good ones. And adding to the confusion, not all expensive ones can be stored for too long as well! So how do you tell the difference? Well, if you are buying wines casually from your local supermarkets, then they are most likely to be the ones that are best to be drunk immediately. The reason being that these wines are specially produced to mature and reach their best taste the moment you purchase them back to your home. In fact, before wines hit the shelves, wine producers have already stored them in oak barrels for a few years to ensure the highest quality, before selling them to supermarkets which are later bought by you. So there is no need to store them further... unless you want them to over-mature and deteriorate! If you still insist in storing these wines for a couple of years more, they will certainly lose their freshness and become worse to enjoy! Common reds such as Beaujolais, Merlot and the inexpensive Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon can be drunk immediately when you take them off the shelf . Don't act smart and let them become stale by storing them for a decade! For simple Beaujolais, it is best to drink them not more than 4 years from their vintage. To recognise them, these young wines are usually in the price range of $20+ to $30 and should be the wines to drink for beginners. As for those that can be stored, these are usually the more expensive Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz which could be stored for 5-10 years, or even decades. Because these special wines only peak after much storing, to drink them young is to simply waste the wine. But as I said before, these wines don't come with a economic price tag and a $100+ wine is considered cheap already!! Most importantly, they are a class of their own: you don't usually find them in the neighborhood supermarkets. You have to seek them out from the more high-end shops that import wines especially from certain regions around the world. In conclusion, don't worry about storing any of the wines that you normally purchase! You can safely drink each and every one of them the moment you bring back home and to enjoy their very fresh and bubbly tastes. This also relates to the next misunderstanding... |