Vintage Wines, A Beginner's Guide

When people refer to a "Vintage Wine" they are actually describing a wine which was made from grapes that were grown for the most part in the same year. When a vintage wine is produced, vineyards will usually take great pains to label the bottle with the particular year associated with it. The rules as to what is considered a vintage wine vary slightly from country to country, however most locations will actually allow a certain amount of the wine to be made from grapes which are not of that wines particular vintage.

The point of vintage wine is that if you have a discerning palette, you will be able to enjoy the subtle differences in flavor, texture, body, and palate that wines from different years will have. These variations are compounded exponentially when you understand that different wines will age differently, and the taste of many higher quality wines will actually improve when properly stored over years.

In general, vintage wines are produced in a single production run; in order to keep various bottles from the same vintage all roughly the same in taste. There are so many factors that can affect the taste of a wine, the climate, the soil, the region, and even the amount of rain or sunlight which falls on the grapes while growing. The purpose of vintage wines, for many vineyards, is to produce a kind of showcase beverage that will set the standard for the rest of the line. This is a way both of keeping consistency in such an amorphous art form, and as a way of showing off the highest quality product that they can produce. There are some vintages which are only produced in years where the grapes are of a certain quality, increasing the demand by decreasing the supply of these beverages.

In the United States the highest quality vintage wines are given an AVA or American Viticultural Area label. This distinction means that the wine was bottled with at least 95% of grapes grown in a certain region during that specific year. If the wine does not require an AVA, than it can still be called vintage, provided that 85% of the beverage was made from grapes grown during the same annual time period.

Non vintage wines are composed of blends of grapes, or blends of vintage wines, from various years, allowing wine makers the flexibility to continue to produce even in bad growing years.

There is a growing debate as to the actual quality of vintage wines as opposed to blended bottles. Many people claim that low cost wines produced cheaply, from a blend of grapes, can be just as good as their high priced vintage companions. On the other side of this debate are the conservative connoisseurs, who claim that consistency of vintage is essential for a high quality wine to be produced. Wine tasting contests have given support to both claims.

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