Knowing when to drink a bottle of wine

There is a stubborn belief that wine improves with age. It is true of a minority of bottles and false of the overwhelming majority of what people buy.

Most wine sold is made to be drunk within two or three years. Kept for ten, it does not become great, it becomes tired. The other way round, a wine built for keeping opened too early tastes hard and closed, and you conclude it was overrated.

Either way you missed the moment. Here is how to aim for it without being a sommelier.

What actually decides when to drink a bottle of wine

Four things, in this order.

Structure. What ages a wine is its tannin, its acidity and its sugar. A tannic, acidic red keeps for a long time; a soft, round red is made for now. A high-acid dry white, a Chablis or a Riesling, keeps far longer than a flabby one.

The appellation. It is the most reliable shortcut and it is free. A classed-growth Bordeaux, a Barolo, an Hermitage are wines for keeping by construction. A Beaujolais-Villages, a Muscadet or a Provence rosé are not, whatever they cost.

The vintage. A hot year gives ripe, broader wines that are often ready earlier. A cool year gives tighter wines that ask for time. The gap between two neighbouring vintages can reach five years of keeping.

What you paid, last. It correlates with ageing potential, badly. A grower’s cuvée at 25 euros can hold fifteen years; a big-brand champagne at 60 euros wants drinking within three.

The ranges that actually help

These are orders of magnitude, not rules. They are enough to stop losing bottles.

• Rosés, simple crisp whites, nouveau : within the year, two at most.
• Soft reds, Beaujolais-Villages, entry-level Rhône, light pinots: two to four years.
• Whites for keeping, premier cru Chablis, Riesling, dry Chenin: five to fifteen years.
• Reds for keeping, decent Bordeaux and Burgundy, northern Rhône, Barolo: eight to twenty years, counted from the vintage and not from the purchase.
• Vintage champagne: eight to fifteen years. Non-vintage, three.

The trap of keeping it a little longer

This is the most common mistake, and it is psychological rather than oenological.

An expensive bottle becomes an occasion you dare not trigger. You wait for the right moment, it never arrives grand enough, and in 2032 you finally open a wine that was perfect in 2026.

The fix is mechanical: when you have several bottles of the same wine, open the first at the start of the estimated window. It tells you where the wine is, and what you learn from that one is worth every guide for the five that follow.

When you only have one, the rule is to open it in the middle of the window, never at the end. A slightly young wine can be decanted. A wine that is past does not come back.

What the bottle tells you before you open it

Two visible signals, useful when you have no information at all.

The colour through the neck, on a clear bottle or held against a lamp. A red turning towards brick or tile has age on it. So does a white that has darkened towards deep gold.

The fill level. On an older wine, a level noticeably below the neck points to slow evaporation through the cork, and therefore a wine that has probably suffered. It is not a guarantee, it is a warning.

And when nobody knows at all

This is the most common case, and nobody says it.

For a co-operative bottle, a local grower’s cuvée or a supermarket label, no database will give you a drinking window, because nobody ever worked one out. These wines have neither a market price nor a critic’s score.

The right response is not to invent a date: treat the wine as one to drink within two years unless the producer says otherwise, and write down what you thought of it. Your own notes beat a manufactured estimate, because they are about your bottle, kept in your cellar.

Holding all this without thinking about it

The work is not knowing the windows, it is remembering them at the right moment, which is on some evening, in front of the shelf, with nothing planned.

That is the problem I set out to solve with Kav: photograph the label, the app recognises the bottle and shows its drinking window, then tells you what is ready to open tonight. And when it does not know, it says so instead of guessing, which is exactly the advice in the paragraph above.

But start with the ranges. They are enough to save half the bottles people lose.