Bin 389 down the years.
Is it worth keeping a bottle of wine for 40 years? Certain well-chosen wines will increase in value hugely over time, but is there any intrinsic point in keeping a wine for so long that drinking it becomes a risky game of brinkmanship involving letting it breathe enough but not too much, where the nose is initially far from enticing, and you find yourself drinking a quite different wine at the last sip from the first?
For the record, I am by no means a wine expert, but I do want to learn more about wine instead of just swilling it with abandon, so it was with an open mind that I went to the Goodwood Revival festival last week for a taste of Penfolds wines dating from 1967 to 2004. Justin, one of Penfolds winemakers, was on hand for a light-hearted tasting session, with the opportunity to learn a little bit about what ageing does to wine, as well as how wines from different years can taste.
The 1967 Bin 7 that we tried last was chosen for two reasons - it's one of the wines Penfolds are most proud of (it sells for £800 a bottle in the few restaurants that serve it), and it fitted very neatly with the Revival, which commemorates the glory days of Goodwood motor racing circuit, from 1936-1967. Most people dress up properly to attend, so the wine-tasting group was rather divergently clad in everything from psychedelic shift dresses to tweed hunting jackets, cravats and flat caps.
The first two wines we tried were both 2004 shiraz, a Bin 28 and 128. The 28, from vines grown in a hotter region of Australia was a much more obvious wine - big and spicy and very mouth-filling. The 128, from cooler Koonawarra was more elegant (and nicer). They were followed by two cabernet Bin 407s (the Bin range is a notch up from the cheaper stuff you can get in most high street off-licences - it sells for at least a tenner, and the difference is marked: I think it's worth paying the difference).
The first was a 2004 and the second a 1996. The younger was minty and apparently tasted of coal dust, the elder had a pleasantly mulchy thing going on and was much darker and heavier. Then we tasted two cabernet shiraz, a 2004 Bin 389 and another from 1994. The first one was subtly spiced and the second had much greater whack of Christmassy stuff going on - quite different wines considering they're made in the same style with the same grape.
Finally we came to the two oldest wines: a 1988 Bin 389 (which sells for around £17) was much browner in the glass than any of the more youthful ones, with a less punchy flavour - the 1994 Bin 389 was so tannic you could fairly feel it in your sinuses.
Then the expensive 1967 Bin 7, which (in my limited experience) was a very complicated wine to drink - some tasters made faces and suggested that there were notes of sheep-dip on the nose. However after allowing it some time to breathe there was a hefty kick of leather - so much so to start with that it was a bit like licking a vintage car seat. It improved hugely after 20 minutes in the glass, becoming softer and more quaffable - and at that point started to have banana-ish notes. Given how much it altered in the air, it would be very hard to know what, if anything, should be eaten with it. For a wine this expensive that strikes me as a bit of a disadvantage.
We were told all sorts of other interesting factoids about wine: red wine often benefits from a half hour in the fridge, since it's ideally served at about 17C, just below room temperature, and older wines don't benefit from early decanting - they only need a few minutes to breathe, whereas younger wines benefit from a longer period out of the bottle.
I remain unconvinced that keeping a wine for 40 years is worth it, since the younger ones were eminently more drinkable. But I will concede that I'm still very much a novice - so does anyone have any advice on what to lay down and for how long? How much do you think is too much to spend on grape juice? And should these very expensive wines be drunk without food?
