FINE-WINE COLLECTORS know the drill well. Every year, you allocate a small sum to buy a case of that special wine you know will improve your cellar. Having bought it on release, you lay it down for maturing until the time comes when its tannins, fruit and acidity are perfectly aligned and the wine is approaching its optimum taste.

Well, that's the theory. In reality, every collector faces the intriguing question of whether to pull the cork or to leave the wine quietly maturing for another year.

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In this information age there is a swathe of resources to call upon. Specialist wine magazines, columns like this, books, websites and high-end wine merchants are constantly reviewing and updating tasting notes on recent vintages and will be able to give you a steer on the present condition of a particular wine. But for those who regularly buy wine to lay down, there are a few catchall rules worth committing to memory.

Any fine wine, well made and stored properly, will last much longer than you think. I categorize fine wine as anything costing more than £15 a bottle from one of Europe's recognized classic regions such as Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhône in France or Barolo in Italy. I'd also include German Riesling, Champagne and wines from Napa in California.

Illustration by Jean-Manuel Duvivier

Wine has an uncanny ability to surprise and I have tasted wines from every decade of the last century and a few from the century before that have tasted far younger than their years.

Second, it's worth remembering that wine does improve with age. While it is lying in your cellar, the tannins (the bitter compounds found in the pips, stalks and skin) will soften, the fruit will develop and a range of very pleasant tertiary flavors will emerge. Up until its optimum drinking point, fine wine can and frequently does taste a little disappointing. The bitter flavors are too astringent, the fruit is masked and the wine tastes young or raw. There is no way around it—great wine takes time to reach maturity. The question is how do we know when that is?


Master of Wine Clive Coates still adheres to the "10-year rule." I canvassed his opinion, and he told me that a good red wine from a good vintage requires 10 years before it is ready for drinking. For good white wines, I would start pulling the cork around five years after the vintage. For Champagne, I would wait two years for non-vintage, five years for vintage and seven years for prestige cuvées.

Mr. Coates argues that once a wine has reached maturity it will stay at its best for however long it took to get there; so a wine that takes 30 years to mature will stay mature for 30 years. He calls this Coates Law of Maturity.

Third, for a wine to age well, the acidity, tannin and alcohol have to be in balance when it is bottled. Too much or too little of any component and the wine won't age properly.

The modern trend is for full, ripe fruit, soft tannins and low acidity. While approachable young, there is some doubt over whether these wines will age well. The flip side is that you don't have to wait 20 years for the wine to come round—another excellent excuse to pull the cork.

—Email Will at or follow him on Twitter: @Will_Lyons