Wine Vintage Chart

I've had about 35 bottles of "special wines" from various times and places aging in a cool dark area, but really wasn't sure when was the best time to drink any or all of them. I was thinking it would sure be handy to have some reference point for each one as to "Hold", "Drink", etc. I did a little searching on the 'net on a rainy day, and went through all the bottles and found that 7 of them are ready to drink, at their prime, RIGHT NOW. The rest could use some more aging, and thankfully, none were "Past Prime". I realize each wine from a region is different, and this is only a guide, but it is much better from my standpoint than just grabbing a bottle randomly when I want a special occasion wine. Now it's time to start opening those 7 bottles!

http://www.winemag.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=95C96641CAAC4A95AE42458E87F0138F&type=gen&mod=Core%20Pages&gid=4F45A52D9ED64AB8800FB5673674BF85

I used to rely heavily on wine charts and Wine Spectator's judgement as to when things are ready to drink. But there are lots of issues with doing that. Among them, most wines really are made to be drunk now or very soon so the recommendations often cause one to overage most wines, age is highly dependent on storage conditions, and drinkability, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, these judgements are usually based on sampling the wines when they are very young if they are specific to the wine, and if they are general for the vintage and region like the linked chart above, they only apply to some mythical, median wine and not to any specific wine. The larger the region they apply to, the less likely it is that they are meaningful for a single wine...

Luckily, I found another source for such information. It does not work so well for obscure or less special wines, but it works more often and much better than not. There are myriad wine sites where people post tasting notes. So if you are curious about how a wine is drinking, go look for them and find some recent ones which will give you a specific idea about your wine's situation. It still does not take into account variations in storage conditions or the taste of the poster, but it is much more specific and better than a vintage chart or tasting from some years ago.

Wine Spectator online has lots of notes, but I find this site even better:

http://www.cellartracker.com/intro.asp (free subscription probably required). If those do not work for you, search for tasting notes and check out some other sites, or just do a search on your specific wine.

If you want to know how a wine is drinking, go to a wine board and post a TNR (tasting note request) for the wine. The best overall place for such a request is the Wine Spectator tasting notes forum, but depending on the wine, eRobertParker, Vinocellar, and Wine Therapy might be better places.

Cellartracker is first and foremost a cellar inventory management program, that also happens to allow users to post tasting notes about bottles they open. It is currently a fair resource for how a wine drinks NOW, and currently a lousy resource for anything else TN-related. Many of the Cellartracker TNs are provided by wine newbies who have little knowledge of what they are drinking, and even less about the prospects for ageability. And to complicate matters further, their palates are rapidly changing as they learn more about what they're drinking, so TNs from these people are not consistent.

If one invests the time to track TNs and settle on one or two people whose TNs calibrate with your palate, then Cellartracker becomes a pretty good resource. But we're talking about a lot of time here, far more than I suspect most people are willing to invest. I also think that in a few years, as more and more people add their notes, Cellartracker will become an outstanding resource for checking up on how a wine is doing.

The sad thing is, even with its (huge) faults in this area, Cellartracker is a better resource to assess drinkability of a particular wine than any vintage chart I've ever seen. Tells you how poorly I think of vintage charts...