Vintage - Day 3

Unfortunately I have no tasting notes for you from yesterday's purchase.  I am visiting my Doctor today because I think I may have a kidney infection, so no drinking for me.  I'll keep you posted.

I decided to research vintage today.  Most bottles, but not all, have a vintage year posted on their label.  Although most wine drinkers don't really care about the date, it is very important to some, and so I found out why.

According to The New Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia A Comprehensive Reference Guide to the Wines of the World, "The anomalies of a vintage can bring disaster to reliable vineyards and produce miracles in unreliable ones."  Basically the vintage stands for the weather climate in which the grapes in that particular bottle were subject to while on their vines.  Hot and dry regions will sometimes have an off year that will provide more rain or cooler temperatures that affect the grapes during that particular year, and vice versa.  This can destroy or perfect a grape in a perfect region and/or can make changes in production size depending on how severe the weather remains during that grow season.  For example, a hail storm or high winds can knock buds off of vines and minimize the production size or destroy the entire crop altogether.

By knowing the year, or vintage, and region of the grapes in a particular bottle you can research whether or not they had a good or bad year for growth and assess if the wine will taste the way it should, or not.  Different countries have different laws about how vintners are allowed to label their wines.  For instance, according to The New Wine Lover's Companion third edition, in the United States of America a vintage can only be labeled if at LEAST 95% of the grapes used in that bottle are from the vintage labeled.  Champagne vintage is a whole other beast.  I'll take some time in the future to tackle that beast and focus my research only on Champagne.  That posting will come another day.

Obviously so much more than weather and vintage influences a consumer when considering a wine purchase, like region, soil types, pests, chemicals used and barreling techniques to name a few but most of those practices will not be labeled on the bottles.  For now, I'll be talking to the experts at my local wine store when I decide to try something new.  But by the end of this year, I'll be one of the experts!