The aroma and taste of a good bottle of wine is never fixed, it changes over time, even within the duration of a party. Tasting and capturing these changes with heart is the joy of wine tasting. Today we are going to talk about the life cycle of wine.
In the mature wine market, wine does not have a shelf life, but a drinking period. Just like people, wine has a life cycle. Its life has to experience from infancy to youth, continuous development, gradually reaching maturity, and then gradually declining, entering old age, and finally dying.
In the life course of wine, the evolution of aroma is close to the change of seasons. The young wines are coming to us with the steps of spring, and they are getting better and better with the melody of summer. From maturity to decline, the mellow wine aroma is reminiscent of the autumn harvest, and finally comes to the end of life with the arrival of winter.
The life cycle is a great way to help us judge the lifespan of a wine and its maturity.
The differences between different wines are obvious, some wines are still young at 5 years old, while others of the same age are already old. Just like people, what affects our state of life is often not age, but mentality.
light wine spring
Aromas of verdant plant sprouts, flowers, fresh fruit, sour fruit and sweets.
prime wine summer
Aromas of hay, botanical spices, ripe fruit, resinous trees, roasted foods and minerals such as petroleum.
middle aged wine autumn
Smells of dried fruit, puree, honey, biscuits, bushes, mushrooms, tobacco, leather, fur and other animals.
vintage wine winter
Aromas of candied fruit, wild fowl, musk, amber, truffles, earth, rotten fruit, moldy mushrooms in over-aged wines. A wine that reaches the end of its life no longer has any aromas.
Following the law that everything rises and falls, it is almost impossible for a wine to shine at every stage of its life. Wines that exhibit a mature and elegant autumnal flavor are likely to be mediocre in their youth.
Taste wine, experience life, refine wisdom
Yuval Harari, a cutting-edge Israeli historian, said in “A Brief History of the Future” that knowledge = experience X sensitivity, which means that the way to pursue knowledge requires years of experience to accumulate, and to exercise sensitivity, so that we can be right understand these experiences. Sensitivity is not an abstract ability that can be developed by reading a book or listening to a speech, but a practical skill that must be matured in practice. And tasting wine is a great way to exercise sensitivity.
There are hundreds of different scents in the world of wine, not all of which are easy to identify. In order to identify, professionals classify and reorganize these odors, such as fruit, which can be divided into citrus, red fruit, black fruit and tropical fruit.
If you want to better appreciate the complex aromas in the wine, feel the changes in the life cycle of the wine, for each aroma, you have to try to recall its smell, if you can’t remember it, you have to smell it yourself. Buy some seasonal fruit and flowers, or smell a single-floral perfume, chew a bar of chocolate, or take a walk in the woods.
As Wilhelm von Humboldt, an important figure in the construction of the modern education system, once said in the early 19th century, the purpose of existence is “to extract wisdom from the most extensive experience of life”. He also wrote: “There is only one peak to conquer in life – to try to experience what it is like to be human.”
This is the reason why wine lovers are addicted to wine