{"id":7420,"date":"2013-05-31T22:57:20","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T22:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=7420"},"modified":"2013-05-31T22:57:20","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T22:57:20","slug":"de-bortoli-shiraz-viognier-2004-the-benefits-of-cellaring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/syrah\/de-bortoli-shiraz-viognier-2004-the-benefits-of-cellaring","title":{"rendered":"De Bortoli Shiraz Viognier 2004, the benefits of cellaring"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There’s something to be said for buying a few bottles of the same wine, then\u00a0cellaring them, and revisiting them at intervals. It’s tremendously rewarding if the wine ages well.<\/p>\n

This wine is an example of where I have done this. I can find notes on the same wine back in 2007<\/a>, when it was three years old, and 2009<\/a>. Now in 2013 I have retrieved another bottle, and pulled the cork.<\/p>\n

The wine has evolved further. It has fresh cherry fruit, some sappy greenness, and a hint of mint. There’s also some apricot from the Viognier still evident. It is in a slightly awkward place, to be honest: there’s some deliciousness, but a combination of sweetness and greenness slightly detracts from the elegance. If I read my previous notes, I liked it a bit more a few years ago.<\/p>\n

But the wine is still developing, and is still delicious –\u00a0I guess it is a question of when you prefer to drink your wines. I would drink this now, and not leave it more than a couple of years. But predicting the ageing trajectory of a wine is a fool’s game, because you can so easily be surprised.<\/p>\n

If you buy wines by the case, the deciding when to drink them is a key factor. If I am honest, I buy wines, cellar them, and then too often I rush to drink them because I have left them too long. There is more joy in drinking a wine before its time than drinking one that you know – if you are honest – has passed its best.<\/p>\n

I suspect that too many great wines, these days, are drunk too young, while too many modest wines are drunk too late. I don’t know the answer, because it is beyond the ability of most\u00a0people to see into the future, and give definitive drinking windows.<\/p>\n

Overall, though, this is a wine that I’m glad I purchased a few bottles of, because it was a spectacular bargain at around \u00a310\u00a0a bottle from UK supermarket Tesco.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s something to be said for buying a few bottles of the same wine, then\u00a0cellaring them, and revisiting them at intervals. It’s tremendously rewarding if the wine ages well. This…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,11,170],"tags":[366,353,85],"class_list":["post-7420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-syrah","category-viognier","tag-australia","tag-syrah","tag-yarra-valley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7420"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7426,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7420\/revisions\/7426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}