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Beauty of Age
Wine is better with age.
No, it is not a universal truth, but lots and lots of wines improve with age.
“Improve” might not even be the right term.
When we put the wine into the cellar (whatever your cellar looks like, as long as it is not a shelf next to your stove which you use every day), the wine starts changing. This is what we call aging. Nobody knows how the wine is changing, how fast, and what this change entails. For the optimists wine enthusiasts like myself, the hope is that wine is evolving, becoming better, and ultimately, delivering more pleasure than it did upon release.
The evolution of the wine, when it actually happens, is not endless. “Whatever goes up will come down”. This is why wine lovers use an important jargon word: “peak”. The wine at its peak delivers the most pleasure one can wish for. Again, nobody knows when the wine reaches its peak, and for how long that peak will last. That is what makes wine amazing – when you open a bottle, you have no idea what you will find inside. An equal opportunity for joy and disappointment before the cork is pulled – the mystery of wine.
Not all wines will improve with age. And when you taste the wine young, upon release, you still don’t know how well the wine will age or whether it will age at all. Yes, everybody can make a guess. Supposedly, wine critics and wine makers are better at guessing the expected lifespan of the wine, including its peak and “past prime” – another important jargon word for the wine that went into decline and now offers less pleasure than it did “at a peak”.
Remember: wine is subjective. Every wine drinker can tell their story, and nobody can tell them that they are wrong.
What prompted this reflection on the wine aging?
A bottle of Portuguese wine, 2013 Enoport Tonel 22 Reserva Douro (13% ABV, 35% Touriga Nacional, 35% Tinta Roriz, 30% Touriga Franca).
I scored 4 bottles of this wine back in 2017 at Wine Till Sold Out (WTSO) for $10.99 each. I tasted the wine through the years, and honestly, it was not really working for me. It was tight, dense, and closed, not offering layers of pleasure as Douro Reserva reds can do, like this 2009 Casa Burmester. Until now.
This was the last bottle (of course :)) and I pulled it out without much hope or expectation – “hmm, let’s see how this is”. Boy, what a pleasure I walked into…
The seduction started with the smell, offering ripe cherries and cassis, with a whiff of the cigar box. The palate followed, voluptuous, layered, generous, and perfectly balanced, with perfectly integrated tannins offering a light tingling and lots of pleasure. A delight (9-).
If someone were to write a textbook for wine lovers “How to enjoy wine”, this wine would be a perfect textbook study, hitting all the important checkmarks:
- Patience is rewarded
- Wine is better with age
- Price is not an indicator of quality and doesn’t predict the ageability of the wine
$10.99. 7 years in the cellar. Lots and lots of pleasure.
A Beauty of Age.
What’s your story?
Do You Have Wine With Your Apps?
And the subject of today’s post is … Apps. No, I’m not referring to the appetizers here – lets talk about the wine phone apps.
Smartphones became extremely popular and widespread nowadays, same as wine (hmmm, is there a connection here?). Smartphones deliver incredible convenience and power of information, available at any instance, day or night, as soon as as one desires to obtain that information. For the most of the time, the information is obtained with the help of so called “Apps”, which is a short for Applications, known in the old days simply as “Programs” or “Software”. But let me not get away here on a tangent, as the plan is to talk about wine. The Wine Apps, to be more precise.
Wine lovers generally want to have some ways to keep track of what they drink, what they like, what the others think of that wine, which wineries they can visit when they travel, what is in their cellars or where to find that particular wine they just had yesterday. And as you would expect, there are apps for all of these tasks.
Quick disclaimer: I’m an iPhone user, so everything I will say here will be pertinent first of all to the iPhone apps – however, I expect that most of the same apps should be available on Android phones. And another quick disclaimer – all the numbers and all the apps I mention here are current as of the date of this post (take a look on the top of the page for that).
Wine is popular today, and it shows in the number of apps available in the App Store. Over the few days as I started working on this post, the number of available apps was steadily increasing, adding new hits daily. The number of apps found searching for the keyword “wine” went from 2,993 two days ago to the 2,998. Of course this is a far cry from 38,877 results in the “travel” category, but still a lot more than many others, for instance, “gardening” at 542.
These wine apps can be split into many different categories. From my experience, trying to categorize objects is usually hard and ungrateful – many apps have a variety of features which make them suitable for the different categories. Nevertheless, let me try to suggest a few different buckets for the wine apps:
- “Wine journal” type – these apps let you keep the records of what you drink, what you liked and so on. These apps might also help you look for the wines you liked. Examples would include Delectable, Drync, Vivino and others.
- Cellar/collection management apps – CellarTracker would be definitely the top example.
- Wine information and research – Wine-Searcher and Wine Spectator WineRatings+ would be the top two dedicated examples, but many apps would allow you to research the wines.
- Wine buying apps – WTSO is a primary example, of course there are more.
- Wine travel and events planning apps – Wine Events, Winery Passport and Cork Sharing would be some I’m aware of – I’m sure there are plenty more, including some from the individual wineries.
- “Just for fun” apps – wine quizzes, puzzles and more – Wine Trivia Quiz would be one of the examples, there should be more.
Note that I’m not trying to differentiate here between free, semi-free (in-app purchases) and paid-for applications. With some apps costing only $0.99, I don’t think it makes a huge difference. In any case, practically all of the most popular apps are free.
Okay, so where am I going with all this? Let me gladly explain. Reason #1 for this post is simply a curiosity. I use very little of the wine apps – Wine-Searcher is very handy, and WTSO is useful. I played some wine quizzes – but was not enchanted with the content (no comparison with Bejeweled Blitz if you want to know my vice). So while I’m not actively using the wine apps, I’m sure that many of you are – and this is what I would like to find out. Leave a comment about your favorite wine apps (if you care, add a few words as to why you like it) – or take an easier route and check your favorite apps in the poll below. You will be able to select up to 5 favorites, or write-in.
Reason #2 – with such a variety of the wine apps in existence, I would like to offer a “platform” for the any wine app maker to explain their application better. If you have or working on the wine app, and would like to present it to the readers of this blog, please send me (contact info in the About section) a short write up – 2-3 paragraphs, about 350 words, 1 – 2 pictures. Your writing can’t be an advertizement, advertorial or a press release – it should be a genuine explanation of what your app is for and what are your differentiators. If your post will fit the criteria outlined here, I will be glad to publish it as a separate post.
So, what do you think of the wine apps? What are you using, or planning to use? Chime in, don’t be shy! Cheers!
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