Opening that bottle of wine from your cellar can be a moment to savour. Not every bottle in a cellar is freighted with deeper meaning. However, every cellar has at least one set aside for an occasion.
In our fast-paced world, the future is measured in financial quarters and calendar years, with some of our most forward-thinking plans being school registration. Our demand for luxury tends to be immediate; why would we wait? Aged wine demands patience, and time is a precious commodity. We cannot simply call a concierge and order up 20 years, if only it were so simple.
We cannot manipulate the time in the cellar and its impact on the wine. It is the product of patience and vision. While we cannot buy time, there is a workaround.
Buying aged wines at auction (where somebody else has done the waiting) is perhaps the best way to “buy time” when it comes to fine wine. However, there is always the first consideration of auction: caveat emptor or buyer beware. While Australian fine wine auction house Langtons is a reliable source for fine wine, the older a wine is the greater the risk.
Indeed, this is all part of the auction game. Find a fine and rare wine, make a bid, cross your fingers, and, if you win, hope it unearths an aged treasure. To take the risk out of opening old bottles, cellarists buy from reliable sources and then hide the wines in the back cellar to avoid temptation.
The waiting game varies from five or more years for a top Australian chardonnay to 20 or more years.