Comments on: Revisiting the Oenophile’s Quandary

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 18:22:08 +0000

I’m not as experienced as Gax perhaps, but at one of the many wineries I’ve visited, we tasted one of their signature annual wines from 10 yrs, 5 yrs and the last harvest. Definite improvement in the 10 yrs batch. It didn’t seem to be a fluke either – they run a similar taste on the wines from this line every year.

By: Jason

Jason — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:41:10 +0000

Sam, while that is the case with whiskey, wine does in fact age in the bottle.

By: James

James — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 10:27:53 +0000

The actual article:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.princeton.edu/~dixitak/home/Elaine.pdf

By: Sam

Sam — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 22:04:24 +0000

I don’t know for sure about wines, but I do know that whiskeys stop improving after they are bottled, because the “aging” for whiskey is due to reactions with the oak barrels and chemicals in the wood, as well as some limited oxygen and moisture transfusion through the wood. If you have a bottle of 15 year old scotch that has been in your cabinet for 5 years, you don’t have a “20 year old scotch”, just 15 year old scotch that has been sitting around.

To the quandry, just drink it when you feel like having nice wine. I’ve had some pretty darn special occasions drinking 2-buck chuck out of the bottle, so I don’t think the wine itself improves the occasion. But when you want nice wine, boy you want it.

By: Adam the Kid

Adam the Kid — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 01:51:29 +0000

@John oooooo, that would piss me off.

By: John

John — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:35:37 +0000

My snarky answer is “drink it before your mother-in-law needs a gift for some stupid coworker’s barbecue and grabs it out of your wine fridge.”

Frickin’ hundred-dollar bottle of wine my wife and I got in Napa we were intending to drink ten years later. Made it about six years… it even had a big “DO NOT DRINK” label I stuck to it to avoid this type of situation. Somehow she missed it.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:57:29 +0000

I did look up to see if the Oenophile’s Quandary was real when I first read the strip. The notes on “continuously improving” thus far have pretty much covered that angle… very *very* specific conditions have to be met to merit any particular bottle of wine being held for more than a few years, and most bottles should be drunk with minimal aging. For instance, the 2010 vintage, when it’s bottled, will likely be one to drink in under 2-3 years. This is due to the exceptionally hot summer, leading to earlier and more complete ripening on the vine. Caveat: I’m an enthusiast, not a professional like those above, and my understanding of this is based on my experience with the 2003 vintage which had a similarly hot summer, wines that came out fantastic early on and began to fall flat in the 2007-2008 timeframe.

That said, given enough information (namely, access to current tasting notes on your particular bottles), the wine quality could be a reasonable approximation of objective, and its future should be a reasonable approximation of certain. If the plan is to drink the wine, not sell it, proper course of action is to assign an ending date before which all of the wine should be drunk. Any improvement in quality prior to that time is irrelevant, as the premise of saving the wine for occasions means that you’re highly unlikely to have all of your best occasions during the wine’s peak.

With this ending date in mind, this is very similar to the mentioned “Secretary Problem”, with the added wrinkle of multiple bottles rather than a single one.

Ultimately, I find it far better to work with Jim’s quote from Sideways. An occasion will be an occasion no matter what bottle of wine I drink with it. I drink nice bottles of wine when I’m in the mood to drink a nice bottle of wine. That may mean that I’ll no longer have a nice bottle of wine one day when I’m in the mood, but that is a far lesser tragedy than not drinking a nice bottle when I had the chance.

By: Tipton Lea

Tipton Lea — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:44:50 +0000

I’m sure someone else has noticed that both the barrel, and the ‘boozer’ are ‘peeing’… or that the child definitely ‘is’, and the barrel is only so metaphorically. Technically, the goblet is relieving itself into the receiver’s mouth. “WINESPORTS!”

By: Rogers George

Rogers George — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:27:44 +0000

Seems to me that this dilemma is a variant of the starship paradox. The paradox is that if we build a starship, a faster one will be built before the first one reaches the destination, and the second will arrive first, so why bother to build the first ship? But the same thing will happen to ship two when ship three is built. Result: no starships get built at all.

By: Gax

Gax — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:41:55 +0000

Indeed wine tends to get some bad notes after 6,7 years. Trust me, I sort of work in this business. There are very few wines that actually remain their taste or may even improve over a perios of say, 10 years. So I wouldn’t advise anyone to save a bottle for 20 years, because he is heading for dissappointment when he actually drinks it.