From Everyday Drinking: In Praise of Older White Wines

n my latest piece for Everyday Drinking, I ask why we treat white wine like milk...

Are older women white wines better than young ones? My latest piece for Everyday Drinking has the answer.

*

Did Benjamin Franklin really say, “In all your amours, prefer old women to young ones”? That’s what Stephen Vizinczey suggests in the opening of In Praise of Older Women, where he argues that “modern culture—American culture—glorifies the young; on the lost continent of old Europe it was the affair of the young man and his older mistress that had the glamour of perfection.”

Substitute mistress with white wine, and you’ll have the point of this essay. And, of course, I want to pique everyone’s interest in the merits of older white wines. I suspect, however, that the more experienced among us already know the pleasures they offer, while the younger ones have yet to discover them.

It turns out that white wines would very much like us to believe they can age gracefully. Well, I say white wines, but what I really mean is the Italian wine consortiums and the like. Their job is to convince people like me, who in turn try to convince people like you, that mature white wines can offer the kind of pleasure to the discerning collector that was once thought to be the exclusive preserve of structured reds.

This charm offensive has meant that, over the past three years, I’ve been invited to a number of events designed to showcase the aging potential of Gavi, tocai friulano, sauvignon blanc and, most recently, Lugana. As a result, I’ve tasted some truly fabulous older white wines—sometimes in even more fabulous locations, lucky me!—and had the chance to reflect on why so many white wines capable of aging remain wines we almost always drink young.

The premise of every event has been the same: people usually drink Lugana/Gavi /sauvignon blanc…while they’re young. But here are some older bottles. Aren’t they great?

And the premise holds true not only for wines with a reputation for being easy-drinking whites, such as Lugana, but also for wines with an established reputation for longevity, such as top white Burgundy. Octavian Wine, one of the world’s leading bonded fine wine storage providers, with more than £2 billion worth of wine under management, shared some striking data when I asked: What is the average age of a wine when it leaves your warehouse and is delivered to a customer’s home address (presumably to be drunk)?

Of course, Octavian caters to collectors, and the wines stored there are, by definition, collectible.

Yet even in this setting, the contrast between white and red wines is striking. The overwhelming majority (78 percent) of white wines shipped to customers came from the previous six vintages, whereas only 40 percent of red wines fell into the same age bracket, with the remainder distributed much more evenly across older vintages. At the other end of the spectrum, just 2.5 percent of white wines delivered were more than 20 years old, compared with 10 percent of reds. In other words, even among serious collectors, white wines are consumed far earlier than reds.

So, can we say that white wines have a reputation problem? (Isn’t it a bit like the old belief that men get better with age, while women, well… they don’t?) Could part of it still be a legacy of the premature oxidation (“premox”) crisis that emerged in white Burgundy in the early 2000s?

The problem known as “premox”—the imperfectly understood phenomenon of white Burgundies aging far more quickly than they should, with some bottles becoming completely oxidized—began to emerge in wines from the 1995 vintage and affected many wines produced through the mid-2000s. Even great Puligny-Montrachet and Meursault, including bottles from some of Burgundy’s finest producers, were not spared. It spread through the region like the plague. Corks, sulphur dioxide, and a host of other factors were blamed. Yet, despite years of research, there is still no consensus on what caused the problem in the first place—or, perhaps more intriguingly, why it seems to have largely disappeared.

While that may well have scared collectors into favoring younger Burgundies, I’d argue that—particularly in Italy—we’re dealing with something different, something more of a chicken-and-egg problem. Italian producers tend to rush their white wines to market rather than holding back stocks for later release. As a result, consumers rarely encounter mature bottles, very few people are systematically tasting mature vintages, and there is little opportunity to build confidence in how these wines age. When invited on press trips producers pour superb older vintages, and in most cases they come from the family’s personal cellar, giving critics the chance to experience and write about just how well some of these wines can evolve, but only anecdotally rather than in any systematic way. These wines almost never reach the market, they exist as demonstrations rather than products. While critics may leave convinced, consumers remain unconvinced because without those experiences, confidence in the wines’ longevity never becomes firmly established.

This, I think, is the heart of the issue. A wine’s ability to age and its reputation for aging are two different things.

The first is determined by the wine itself—its acidity, concentration and balance. On this front, research is advancing along two complementary lines.

One seeks to establish whether a grape variety possesses intrinsic aging potential by identifying its reservoir of aroma precursors and understanding how these evolve over time—whether they generate new layers of complexity during ageing or simply fade as the wine oxidizes. For example, the team at the University of Verona, led by Professor Maurizio Ugliano, has been mapping the volatile compounds and aroma precursors of dozens of Italian grape varieties (including turbiana, the grape of Lugana) to understand how each develops its own distinctive aromatic signature with age.

The other line of research seeks to answer a more practical question: what do producers need to do in the vineyard and the winery to craft wines that age well? While Chardonnay’s capacity for aging is well established, the Burgundy Wine Board (BIVB), perhaps prompted by the lingering shadow of the premox crisis, sponsored a six-year study (VOLTA) to investigate how vineyard and winemaking practices influence the longevity of white Burgundy. The study concluded that much of a wine’s ageing potential is built during pressing and élevage, rather than being determined by the grape variety alone.

Yet aging potential alone is not enough to create a reputation for longevity. That reputation is built by the market. A region only earns a reputation for longevity when producers keep back stock, critics regularly taste mature vintages (as they do with features such as “Bordeaux 10 Years On”) merchants sell them and consumers learn what those wines become with time. Without that ecosystem, even genuinely age-worthy wines continue to be treated as wines to drink young.

Only two of the Lugana producers I visited in my recent press trip hold back stock. And even then, the quantities they retain don’t seem sufficient to create a meaningful secondary market or establish a culture of drinking mature vintages. There is, of course, an obvious reason for this. Holding back wine requires producers to sacrifice current cash flow while investing in additional storage capacity—whether barrels, tanks or bottle aging—in the hope of selling the wine later at a higher price. I recently tried to estimate what aging actually costs a producer (calculations from Credible Signals):

A good barrique costs around €1,000 and can be used new or seasoned. Assume it’s used once: after losses you get 200 liters of wine, so the barrel cost is €5 per liter. Labour and electricity add €0.40 per liter. Storage costs €6 per month per barrique — about €0.40 per liter per year. Financing adds another €0.30 per liter if you borrow at 5% on €5.80 (barrel + handling + storage). That’s roughly €6 per liter, or €4.50 per bottle. If you use the barrique three times, the additional cost drops below €2 per bottle.

Bottle aging is cheaper but still significant. Storage might cost €6 per month per pallet (600 bottles), or €0.12 per bottle per year. The real cost is the so-called opportunity cost: if a wine could sell now for €10 but doesn’t, the producer must finance that cash flow, adding roughly €0.50 per bottle in interest. The total cost for an extra year in bottle is around €0.62 per bottle.

Depending on the aging method, every extra year can cost a producer anywhere from around $0.77 to $5.14 per bottle before any additional profit is realized. Building a reputation for longevity requires producers to sacrifice that cash flow in exchange for uncertain future returns.

For collectors, however, that scarcity creates an unusual opportunity. Because relatively few mature white wines reach the market, the category remains underdeveloped. Prices often reflect how these wines are consumed rather than how well they actually perform with age.

I realize this may sound a little far-fetched, but indulge me for a moment. Imagine collecting Meursault in the 1970s or 1980s. On a recent trip to Burgundy, the president of the Comité Bourgogne told me that many Meursault producers in those days barely made ends meet because the wines simply weren’t in fashion. (I can’t help wondering whether the dominance of Robert Parker’s Bordeaux-centric era played some part in that...) Those who bought and cellared Meursault back then weren’t following trends but instead investing in something before the rest of the market caught on. Looking back today, it’s hard not to envy them. They were able to buy extraordinary wines at prices that seem unimaginable now.

I’m not predicting that Lugana, Gavi, or Soave will become the next Meursault. That’s beside the point. Every great collecting category was once obscure. The excitement of collecting lies in the possibility of discovering tomorrow’s classics before everyone else does. Mature Italian white wines feel like one of those rare corners of the wine world where there is still genuine room for exploration.

Unlike Bordeaux or Burgundy, where decades of criticism have established fairly clear hierarchies, many Italian white wines remain largely unexplored territory. We don’t yet know which producers will prove the most age-worthy, which vintages will shine brightest or which wines will ultimately define their regions. We simply don’t have enough evidence yet. And perhaps that’s precisely what makes this journey so fun. The reality is that many producers themselves are still discovering the ageing potential of their own wines.

But things are turning. From tasting a number of Lugana, I can say that some are genuinely age-worthy and compelling, while others are less convincing. In some of the less successful examples, the oak dominates, overwhelming rather than complementing the grape’s delicate aromatics. More broadly, I think Lugana—and some other emerging fine wine regions—is still searching for its signature style. By that, I mean that producers are still working out which winemaking techniques best express the region and its native grape. The balance between oak, lees aging, texture, freshness and fruit purity has yet to reach the level of consensus and refinement seen in more established fine wine regions.

That impression was echoed by Davide Slaghenaufi, an oenologist and biotechnologist at the University of Verona, where he is part of the team studying the aging potential of turbiana in Lugana. Having also trained in Bordeaux under Denis Dubourdieu, he believes that Italian producers, particularly when working with the country’s many indigenous grape varieties, still have much to learn about the use of oak from their French counterparts.

Yet the progress already made is remarkable. Some producers have demonstrated just how extraordinary mature Lugana can become. Zenato’s Lugana Riserva ‘Sergio Zenato’ 2005 was one of the finest mature white wines I tasted on these trips, offering a glimpse of what the region is capable of when terroir, viticulture and winemaking come together.

Elsewhere, there are producers trying to build a reputation for age-worthy white wines almost single-handedly. Villa Bogdano, for example, is championing the little-known Lison DOCG, investing in research, innovation and a deeper understanding of tocai friulano, despite the financial incentives that often favour uprooting old vineyards rather than preserving them. Changing perceptions of an obscure appellation is a slow and expensive undertaking.

That may sound like a limitation, but I increasingly see it as an opportunity. Collectors often dream of discovering great wines before everyone else does and that’s why mature Italian white wines are exciting.

They are not a finished story. They are a story still being written.