Friday, 7 April 2006
Management Consultant, author and avid wine collector Louis
Coutts, ponders the rewards of enduring the temptations of opening
your wine too early.
There is a famous quotation that is credited to a “bookie” which
goes something like this. “A guy ought to have a bet everyday;
otherwise he could go through life lucky and not know it!” To
the wine lover, the inverse of this formula is more likely to be
true. If you don’t leave your good wine in your cellar for years,
you might drink everything you buy too soon and never know what you
are missing.
The rewards for careful cellaring wines are enormous and in some
cases, the longer one keeps the wine, the greater the rewards. There
are many gurus around the world who talk about the life of wines and
rarely do they talk about wines having lives over twenty five years.
They are aided and abetted by the wine makers, many of whom tend to
make wine to be consumed earlier rather than later. What treasures
must have been missed.
I have just had three experiences that make the point. I am a
hopeless hoarder of wine. I buy stuff and put it away and then buy
more stuff and put it away and occasionally open a bottle. However,
the collection grows as does the age of the wine and I am now
regrettably old enough to have experienced some of the fruits of
coming across wines that are thirty five to forty years of age or
even older.
The first experience arose from a conversation I had with a close
friend who said that the ’66 Bordeaux were over the hill. A cold
shudder went down my spine as I have quite a few of them. So one
evening I got out a 1966 Chateau Lafite and had it with this friend
and served it masked. He thought that it must have been twenty years
of age. It was in fantastic condition, quite light in colour,
powerful in bouquet and wonderful fruit with such refinement and
complexity. My friend thought that it would last for many years.
A week later I had some friends visiting from South Africa and I
wanted them to experience an old Australian wine and so I came
across a 1972 St Henri in my cellar with the “Auldana Vineyard”
script on the bottle. I had had a ’72 Grange not too long ago and my
recollection is that the Grange didn’t quite have the refinement of
this wonderful wine which was in the prime of life. My South African
friends who are pretty big time and get around the world said that
it was the best wine they had ever had.
The next night was my table tennis night when two of my friends and
I play table tennis and then open a wine. I took along a 1967
Chateau Tahbilk Cabernet Sauvignon made by Eric Purbrick. He was an
interesting character. He was a barrister in England and his mother
suggested to him that he visit his Australian Estate at Nagambie in
Victoria. When he visited it, most of the estate had been given over
to farming but a residue formed the vineyard. He stayed, worked like
a Trojan and between the early sixties and early seventies made some
of the greatest, if not the greatest red wines ever produced in
Australia. The 1967 is magnificent. My friends, without knowing what
it was, described it as up there with the best wines in the world
and guessed that it must be twenty five years of age, perhaps
thirty. Unfortunately, there were only four thousand bottles
produced. The 1962 is a masterpiece but only 2,800 bottles were
produced.
So many old wines have been produced in Australia and overseas and
have never been given the chance to reach their maturity or to
return to their owners the immense pleasure that is derived from
sharing the result of the dedication and skills of past masters in
wine.
Many of the wines made thirty and more years ago by well known
makers from the better wine regions of Australia that are still in
existence and which have been well cellared are in the prime of
their life. Unfortunately, most of them have been consumed too soon.
So if you want to go through life lucky as a wine lover and know it,
take a punt on putting down better Australian wine from good regions
and good years and wait thirty years. The likelihood of picking
winners is far higher than if you drink them every day.
Copyright © 2006 Louis A Coutts, All Rights
Reserved.
About the Author
Louis Coutts is the principal at Management Consultancy "Coutts
and Connor" (
http://www.couttsandconnor.com.au ), a regular contributor to
the Australian Institute of Management journal and to Business
Review Weekly he is also a founding member of the not for profit
institution "The Hawthorne Academy"
(
http://www.hawthorne-academy.org ). |