Don’t Try to Age the Wine
The longer you open a bottle of wine, the better, right? Well, if you haven’t actually bought a good aged wine, not really.
As certified wine sommelier Madeleine Puckett of Wine Folly explains , most wines these days are not designed to age. In fact, Puckett says most of the wine you can buy at the store won’t last as long as you think. Here are a couple of general rules of thumb:
The shelf life of red wines every day is about 5 years.
Everyday white and rosé wines have a shelf life of about 2-3 years.
And waiting for the end of your life to drink them doesn’t really make them better. It’s also important to note that the wine you buy at the supermarket is usually not all that difficult, and Puckett says a wine that isn’t difficult to start with won’t get more complicated as you age. So there is no point in trying. Unfortunately, the bottle of yellowtail chard you bought in 2011 is not getting better.
There are also wines worth aging, but they have to be bought from serious wine dealers, specialty shops, or straight from the vineyards. What should you pay attention to? Decently aged red wines are bright, high in tannins (which gives the wine a bitter taste), high acidity and possibly with the addition of spirits such as port. White wines, worthy of aging, have an almost pure color at first glance, have a high acidity and are very sweet (like dessert wines). The Pack has an excellent table of wine types to age and for how long .
But honestly, unless you are serious about investing in wine, you should simply buy the wine you want to drink here and now . Better yet, just grab a glass of wine . It tastes pretty good for coming out of a plastic bag into a cardboard box, you get a lot more for less money, it lasts longer, and oh well, you can’t tell the difference from expensive items. Stop kidding yourself.
How to determine if a wine is age-worthy | Wine stupidity