Aging Spring Wines

An aspect that may take years for me to gain some handle upon is the effect of aging on different wines. General wisdom calls for aging a wine at least half a year and ideally a year. Beyond that, my impression is that wines have a certain stability, after that first year's aging.

Is this the actually the case with spring wines? Last Thursday, coming home from a day's labors -- literally labors in my case, since I had been doing some concrete work -- I fetched up a Wine 22, a dandelion wine that had seemed quite satisfactory when sipped during the time of dandelion blooming, and in the month or so before that.

On Thursday the flavor seemed to me less than ideal -- making me wonder if these wines should not be enjoyed early in spring, and finished before the arrival of summer. The wine is still changing as the season does, after all.

Does it not seem possible that the wine is at its peak at that point of its first year of age, when its ingredients are again fresh at hand, in yard and field?

Is it not just as possible that the spring-influenced imbiber is at peak receptivity for the product of the season being re-experienced?

Another thought is that basement temperatures may be part of the picture. Those temperatures are now rising from their winter lows. Bringing a wine up from the basement is not the same as it was: for the wine I bring up today, though cool, is warmer than the somewhat chilled wine I brought up in April.

Chilling the wine does seem to restore some of that spring freshness. I remain uncertain, however, about whether the wine tastes quite as good as it did when the yellow brightness of riant dandelion blooms adorned the yard.

Cheers ...

Call It Aging, If You Will

Hours pass with seemingly small result; yet they are necessary hours.

Same way, months.

This past Sunday I spent time in kitchen sterilizing bottles, doing a little bottling of wines from their secondaries, and a bit of racking of other wines that were in less-than-gallon bottles. Martha was a little alarmed yesterday when looking at beer recipes to find that a porter she plans to make soon will take eight weeks. These wines I was moving from container to container were ones started in June, in July, in August. Since most of the source ingredients grew in our backyard, the timeline might be shoved back even farther.

Red currants seem to have grown in this area for what may be, in human terms, forever. When this house was built, around 1900, woods had more of a foothold; and hereabouts red currants are part of the woods. The plant from which we harvested was one we planted, though. We did so just to the west of the grapes, thinking they would be shaded in morning -- a consideration we are no longer sure was necessary, since for most of our backyard getting away from the shade of surrounding trees is more the issue. Since this is the first real red currant wine for us, it has been several years in the making -- if measured from our planning, digging and planting.

As a wine, though, it is only around its sixth month or so. Almost halfway there, to the wine-bottling mind. Yet all wines are drinkable after first fermentation, if perhaps not quite desirably so. Sitting down to a gallon crock of new wine would not be most people's idea of a palate-pleasing time. Aging works wonders, when the aging is done properly. Finding out what "properly" means, at all stages of the process, is part of the experiment.

And I think at times that this finding-out is a means to age myself more properly than I have managed to do at many points in the past.

Cheers ...