Drunk!

How long can you keep a bottle of wine? Well the obvious reply is ‘Until you open it’ – although I must warn you that giving that answer risks you receiving a glass of wine in the face. Working out how long to squirrel away your precious bottles of wine is a very inexact science. You can consider lots of different factors – varietal, style, vintage, winemaker, price, storage conditions etc – and still pop the cork to find out you were completely wrong, you should have drunk it ages ago and your wine now tastes like a bucket of rancid old socks.

Generally speaking, there are four different ‘ingredients’ which will help to preserve your wine – alcohol, tannins, sugar and acidity – and often you will find a couple of them combining to give extra life (ie sugar and acidity in Noble Late Harvest wines and alcohol, tannin and sugar in Port). 

When it comes to dry red wines, then conventional wisdom says that it should be alcohol and tannin which are the preservatives, something seized upon by many a winemaker to justify hulking great alcohols of 15%+ and ink-black tannins which take the skin off your teeth. But is this the only way to make your wines last? Not if the tasting I was at the other week is anything to go by.

Winemaker Sakkie Kotze of Le Bonheur clearly enjoys his role as a ‘Grumpy Old Man.’ Currently celebrating his 16^th year as winemaker, he entertained us all with his sideswipes at Cape Legend’s marketing department for pricing his wine too low, at anybody who insists wine has to go with food (“I make wines you can drink at any time of the day – including before breakfast!”), anyone who puts stickers on his bottles (those darned marketing folk again!) and finally at the Merlot grape (“such a slut!”), whilst pouring large tots of his flagship wine, Prima, as the rain lashed down outside.

The Prima is normally about ¾ Merlot and ¼ Cabernet Sauvignon, although the Cab part has been increasing in recent years, as has the alcohol to a still-modest 13.6%. Of his ‘recent’ vintages, I loved the 1997 and the 2003, but things really started getting interesting when he produced a magnum of the first Prima ever made, the 1989.

And this is the reason I am telling you this story because it basically throws all my previous advice out the window  – this wine was made 21 years ago and had an alcohol of a measly 11.75%!  Considering the high proportion of Merlot (a less-tannic grape than Cabernet Sauvignon) and the fact that they never use press-wine, only free-run juice, I can’t imagine the tannins can ever have been that high so, by any laws going, this should be entirely insufficient to preserve the wine for this length of time.

Yet the wine was lovely – cherry-fruit with spice, licorice and truffles. The 2007 is about to be released and will be available from a variety of retailers for about R80 a bottle which is a steal. I should keep it if you can possibly manage to do so and hopefully, in 21 years time, we can all have further proof that guessing how long a wine will age for really is just a shot in the dark.

PS – we also had an amazing lunch cooked by Sakkie’s wife including the best koeksisters I have ever had in my life ever, ever, ever!!! I am her slave for the rest of her life!!