“TIME IN A BOTTLE”
Wine is called the nectar of the Gods. A lot has been written about this wonderful drink and what better occasion than to tell our readers about wine. After all we in Nashik are privileged to live in a wine producing State especially since grapes grow in the District. In my travels around the country as an Army officer, I have tasted, enjoyed and even gifted this wonderful drink. I used to hoard the few bottles of wine I could lay my hands on in what I called my “cellar”. It was not the true blue blood cellar one is familiar with, usually a basement or cooler place than the rest of the house; but the word “cellar” worked just fine. A place to keep my bottles safely was the bedroom cupboard that my wife often wrinkled up her nose at. The space was overheated by wine standards. Because I took care in selecting the type of wine, each bottle was to me an investment and became a collection. It was a dream that while this horde grew there was some organic change taking place in the wine bottle thereby transforming my precious collection into a silken treasure. I had my share of nightmare too. I often dreamt that the corks were disintegrating in the night. Apart from my precious treasures being reduced to naught, I was in fear of the damage the linen cupboard would come to and a tirade from the wife.
But let me give the reader an account of my wine drinking forays. I would invariably ask myself the question as to whether a wine regardless of its vintage was really ready, I would let my desire get the better of me, and go ahead and open the bottle. Unlike the rich Barons who have overstuffed cellars beneath their medical castles, I had no margin for error. Wine made by friends was treated the same way as the prized Claret or Bordeaux, I had been gifted by a well to do friend. The nobility inherits bins of claret, all of it maintained under near perfect temperature and humidity, which for claret is a slightly damp 55 degrees. Should they pop the cork from a ’61 Latour and find that the wine was unready, they merely drink up and ruminate pleasantly upon the other thirty or forty bottles remaining in the cellar.
Few of us lowborn have the kind of liquid assets it takes to invest in cases of wine. We usually own one or two bottles of a favorite. The Goa wines and more recently the stuff one gets from Hyderabad, was then treasured. And yet we drank as if there was an endless flow of the nectar. That kind of drinking of wine is gauche as a wine regardless of its vintage, must be drunk in moderation, with the appropriate company and if even in solitude it is not to be what I call “guzzled’ down. Even if we did have the resources to buy an additional bottle, we’d have nowhere to store it. So we keep the odd few hidden away, from the teenagers who might find it amusing to share a ’53 Lafitte with friends. When I was a teenager years, I did know where my father kept his wine, and I did sneak off a bottle of Australian 999 Port to sip with my friends. I did not have the faintest inkling on the quality or the methods of wine drinking, except it tasted sweet and did make us at the time feel delightfully heady.
We often do not drink our wine collections. We cradle, inspect them, fondle them, but never end up opening a bottle and drinking. The usual excuse we give ourselves is that it’s being saved up for an occasion. Some of us turn into collectors instead of drinkers, loath to deplete our hoard by consuming part of it. Some follow the financial appreciation of their wines, gloating as a ’71 Burgundy purchased for around Rs 75/= turns up in a wine-store catalogue years later for Rs750/=. They do not drink their wines because they are worth too much. It is a terrible thing to consider yourself unworthy of your wines.
My eternal problem was always a lack of confidence, a fear of opening a prized bottle at the wrong time. I know that if I am too early, the tannin --- the chemical extract from the skin of the grape that acts as a preservative --- will dominate the wine. If I wait too long the wine will dry out. Vintage charts give an idea of when a particular wine is ready to drink, but the variables are endless. Every wine is different, and every wine merchant worth his salt is different --- you seldom know how your wine was treated before you bought it.
Recently, I read an extraordinary statement from a noted Manhattan merchant, Peter Morrel, who wrote, “ A wine that would normally mature in ten years at 60 degrees will mature in seven or eight years when stored at 66 degrees.” I excitedly assumed that Morrel had stumbled upon one of the more important finds of the twentieth century, a scientific means of determining when a wine is ready to drink. No longer would wine storage be guesswork. Alas it was not so. Morrel, by no means a modest man, conceded on persistent questioning that he had overstated his point. He said the theory that wine ages faster under warmer cellaring is sound, but there is no way of quantifying it. His general rule for Red Bordeaux is ten years from harvest to drinkability, but it is clear that some of the best wines, such as the 1966 vintage are not ready to drink.
In the years to come, the formerly arcane problem of wine storage will bedevil many of us, partly because of the growing interest in wine futures, a means of buying wine before it is even bottled. In 1983, merchants began touting the 1982 Bordeaux as one of the so-called vintages of the century and advised buying immediately, before it was all gone. There were a lot of semi frenzied wine buyers who lined up to buy wine they wouldn’t receive for more than a year, and when the wine arrived had to shove it under beds etc. All those who bought their 1982 Bordeaux without considering whether they could store it properly were lucky. They did not have to wait for the ten-year aging time, since the wine was rich in fruit and moderate in tannin and was good well before the ten-year restriction. What with the growing interest in wines and their consumption in the metropolitan areas of India, wine tasting is arranged with the oddball Indian wine connoisseur from one of the many French language academies masquerading as an “expert”. Often they are as good as anyone else, with advice on what bread or cheese to nibble with a glass of Château, but not able to tell which vineyard it actually came from. They invariably go wrong when it comes to the simple and practical method of how to hold a wine glass. But there is the genuine get together where wine drinking has found acceptance and is slowly taking over from more stronger spirits.
There was a friend of the family who was an ICS Secretary, who hailed from Goa, that beautiful State of India so many of us know so little about. He was a true wine connoisseur, who knew his way around wines. He used to narrate to us how the wine industry would go through a tremendous change, since it all depended upon the fruit and the tannin, in the skin of the grape. The variety being experimentally then grown in parts of India (I talk of 1962) would one day change the concept of an old or vintage wine. How correct he was, since wines nowadays taste just the same as they would even if bottled over ten years ago.
In truth, people without ideal storage facilities should avoid buying any wine they plan to keep for more than a few months. This is very sound advice, but there will always be the odd wine enthusiast like me who will try to store a wine, in the hopes that it will taste better after a few years. Every budding wine drinker would do well to learn up on his wines, before he or she drops a brick in public about a vintage, when for all they know it may be a wine that was just bottled a few days earlier. As a tip from an old tippler, any wine that is about 5 to 6 years is safely called a vintage though the ten year limit still holds good. So buy up and drink up, its fun and its also good for the health.
Lt Col(Retd) Sukhwant Singh
10 Aug 2001
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