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Cellaring Wine — Usable?
March 27th, 2007Building a wine cellar is a difficult proposition; you need space, money and time. These are obvious points, but there is one other thing that is less obvious and perhaps the most difficult — knowing which wines to cellar and for how long.
Did you ever see a wine label say “Drink now through 2010″, or “Best cellared for five to fifteen years”? Of course not. I’ve even visited many vineyard websites and have never once seen this mentioned by the producer. For those who aren’t extremely knowledgeable in this area (most of us), the only way to find out whether a wine should be cellared or not is to get lucky with an online review or know somebody who knows.
Why is this? From a marketing / sales standpoint, the percentage of people who purchase wines to cellar must be extremely low, so I can understand why a winery wouldn’t be promoting the fact that a particular wine should be stored, but on the other hand if they are making wine that will be even better in five years, wouldn’t they want people to know this?
One good thing is the emergence of wine sharing sites on the web, such as cellartracker, cork’d and winelog. These sites allow the experts to provide some extra information about wine and help n00bs try to learn more about how to build up a nice collection.
I’ve been using Cellar Tracker because it has a large community of serious oenophiles. Cork’d is a bit more light and fun; I haven’t really played with Wine Log yet.
March 28th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Thanks for the mention, Mike.
I’d say that WineLog falls somewhere between CellarTracker and Cork’d in terms of the “seriousness” of our community and “fun” of our user interface. If you are interested in trying out our site, contact me by email and I can help you import some of your CellarTracker data into your Wine Log to get your rolling.
I think you make some great points about the drinking window of wines. One of our next cellar-focused feature releases will be an update to how “drink-by” dates are handled on our site.
I have seen drink-by dates on some wines I’ve purchased. One bottle from Stormhoek I just got has a “ultimate freshness” graphic on it that, although a little hard to read, shows when the optimal time to drink the wine is.
One reason I can think of as to why wineries might not want to put something like “this will be better in 2010″ is that they are for the most part interested in selling out as quickly as possible. Having that text on the label kind of implies that the wine is not perfect RIGHT NOW, which is the message I’m sure they’d rather promote. You and I know that consumers like good old fashioned honest data, so maybe more wineries will turn around and be proud of the shelf-life of their wine.
It would be interesting to get the perspective of some other wine industry folks. I’ll forward your inquiry along to some people on our team.
April 24th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
I’m kinda bummed because I did reach out to Jason but I never heard back.